Epitopea
Meet Epitopia at the UK Pavilion (Hall B, Stand 2348).
Epitopea is a recently established cancer immunotherapeutics company based in Cambridge (UK) and Montreal(Canada). We are translating the work of our scientific founders, Claude Perreault and Pierre Thibault who asked: what unique features of cancer cells are visible to T cells and can be targeted for immunotherapies? Using immunopetidomics, our founders discovered mutation-containing tumour-specific antigens (TSAs) detectable by mass spec are rare and dramatically outnumbered by aberrantly expressed or cryptic TSAs arising from a variety of dysregulations common in cancer, such as alternative splicing, dysregulated epigenetic control and loss of translational fidelity. These TSAs have a far greater chance of being shared between patients than mutation-containing TSAs; furthermore, emerging results indicate a great many of them are immunogenic and that they are likely to be amongst the targets exploited by immune checkpoint blockade. Epitopea intends to define and develop a pipeline of therapeutic vaccines for durable cancer control.
