NEW YORK (360Dx) – Protagen said today it has entered a collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco to use the company's SeroTag platform for research into immunotherapies for prostate cancer.
The collaboration will use Protagen's technology to predict patient response to immunotherapy treatment and to monitor patients for adverse effects, including development of so-called cold tumors that respond poorly to immunotherapy, the company said.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"Although cancer immunotherapies can be effective in many different cancers, success in prostate cancer has been more limited," Lawrence Fong, leader of the Cancer Immunotherapy Program at UCSF's Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, said in a statement. "Nevertheless, we know that a small proportion of prostate cancer patients can respond to monotherapies. Immunologic profiling of these patients could enable approaches to patient selection. This collaboration could provide opportunities to accomplish this goal."
The collaboration follows several other projects Protagen has recently taken on in cancer immunotherapy, including agreements with the German National Center for Tumor Diseases, the National Cancer Institute, and the Gustave Roussy Institute of Oncology.