Technology evaluation: DCVax, Northwest Biotherapeutics.

DCVax, a dendritic cell-based immunotherapy, is an active immunization platform being developed by Northwest Biotherapeutics for the potential treatment of multiple malignancies, including hormone-refractory metastatic prostate cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer, renal cancer and glioblastoma multiforme. The DCVax platform is tailored to a specific cancer type with either purified tumor-specific antigen or tumor cell extracts derived from patients at the time of resection. Phase I/II clinical trials of DCVax-Prostate have been completed, and phase III clinical trials have recently been initiated. DCVax-Brain is currently undergoing phase II clinical trials, and DCVax-Lung recently received approval from the US FDA for phase I clinical trials.