Peregrine Pharmaceuticals today announced that a paper titled “NHS76/PEP2, a Fully Human Vasopermeability-Enhancing Agent to Increase the Uptake and Efficacy of Cancer Chemotherapy,”
The paper, which was published in the Clinical Cancer Research journal, shows that NHS76/PEP2 greatly enhanced the uptake and efficacy of a variety of chemotherapeutic agents in solid tumor models.
The publication contains data showing that pretreatment with NHS76/PEP2, Peregrine’s lead vasopermeability-enhancing agent (VEA), enhanced the efficacy of chemotherapy in tumors known to be sensitive to the specific drugs. In addition, the report shows that NHS76/PEP2 plus chemotherapy also generated responses in tumors normally resistant to specific therapies, such as MAD109 murine lung carcinoma treated with paclitaxel (Taxol), vinblastine (Eli Lilly’s Velban) or 5-FU.
Moreover, improvements in drug uptake were seen in as little as one to two hours following pretreatment with NHS76/PEP2.
NHS76/PEP2 is the result of a fusion protein between NHS76, a fully human version of one of Peregrine’s tumor necrosis therapy antibodies, and PEP2, a peptide derived from interleukin 2.