Development of a cell immunotherapy targeting non-conventional tumor antigens in ovarian cancerbroad
OVACell · Horizon Europe grant · 2024-03-01–2026-04-30
EC contribution
Total cost
Beneficiaries
About the data
Source: CORDIS (official EU open data), Horizon Europe. Framework HORIZON · call HORIZON-EIC-2023-ACCELERATOR-01 · scheme HORIZON-EIC-ACC-BF · topic HORIZON-EIC-2023-ACCELERATOROPEN-01. CORDIS record →
Objective
Ovarian cancer represents the most lethal gynecological cancer and one of the deadliest cancers in women globally, it affected more than 80 0000 women worldwide in 2022 and killed 207000 the same year, 25000 only in Europe. A woman's risk of getting ovarian cancer during her lifetime is about 1 in 78. Due to the non-specific nature of the symptoms, it is hard to early detect ovarian cancer, and there is currently a lack of effective screening tools for an early diagnosis. Consequently, 75% of patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage leading to poor outcomes, and strongly reducing their chances for survival: only 30-40% five years after diagnosis. Even though several treatments are currently approved for ovarian cancer, they present several limitations and fail to meet the high medical need. Indeed, 2/3 of patients do not respond to available treatments or relapse after 1st- and 2nd-line treatment.ErVaccine aims to provide an innovative solution by developing a new generation of TCR-T cell therapy targeting non-conventional antigens. With its advanced proprietary bioinformatic platform, ErVaccine successfully identified antigens derived from human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) that exhibit abnormal expression exclusively in cancer cells and shared by a high proportion of patients. From this work, the company developed TCR-OV1, a TCRT-cell therapy with a demonstrated efficacy profile in in vitro and ovarian cancer animal models. We expect no major safety concern as we did not observe any toxicity in our preclinical models and based on the specific HERV expression in the tumors. Now, ErVaccine wants to accelerate the development of its solution by scaling-up its small-scale manufacturing process and demonstrating in humans the efficacy and safety of TCR-OV1. TCR-OV1 has the potential to be a transformative therapy for ovarian cancer, being the first safe and efficient TCR-T cell therapy in this indication.
Beneficiaries (1)
| Organisation | Country | Role | EC contribution | SME |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ERVIMMUNE | FR | coordinator | €2,499,999 | Yes |
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