Ichor is investing broadly in research to develop the TriGrid™ Delivery System (TDS) as the safest, most efficacious, cost effective and easy to use system available for clinical delivery of DNA drugs. Ichor is developing products incorporating TDS in three broad areas: therapeutic proteins, vaccines for serious infectious diseases and therapeutic cancer vaccines.


Therapeutic Proteins

Among therapeutic protein programs, Ichor is developing a dramatically improved treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. The current standard of care for MS is treatment with recombinant interferon beta (rIFN-β) protein wherein patients must be injected multiple times a week and suffer side effects from high interferon levels following treatment. Ichor believes that its TDS / IFN-β therapy will provide several advantages to MS patients, such as once every three months dosing, a more constant level of the protein, thereby reducing side effects, and allow possible combination use with other MS drugs due to the reduced cost of TDS / DNA drug treatment compared to recombinant protein therapies.


Vaccines for Serious Infectious Disease

Ichor is advancing a rapid response anthrax product toward the clinic. Current trends in pharmaceuticals for biodefense countermeasures and vaccines place significant emphasis on prophylactics and therapeutics for anthrax among other pathogens that could be used in biological attacks. Ichor has demonstrated the ability of its TDS / DNA drug against anthrax to elicit a rapid and durable immune response against the anthrax bacteria in several animal species.

In addition to its anthrax DNA vaccine program, Ichor is leveraging NIH/SBIR grant funding and strategic partnerships and collaborations to establish proof of principle for programs focused on HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B virus (HBV) and other pathogens.


Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines

The TriGrid™ platform holds great potential to enable several therapeutic cancer vaccines for extending survival and increasing quality of life for cancer patients. TDS / DNA drug therapeutic cancer vaccines can:

• generate multi-specific response to targeted antigens, which work together to prevent tumor from escaping immune system detection,
• target multiple antigens to increase the range of patients for whom a specific treatment is appropriate,
• combine tumor antigens with immunostimulatory genes to boost vaccine potency.

To accelerate its therapeutic cancer vaccine program, Ichor has established a relationship with a leading US comprehensive cancer center. A collaboration and licensing agreement were entered into to conduct preclinical and human clinical trials on a DNA vaccine candidate based on tumor-associated antigen constructs previously tested in Phase I clinical trials for treatment of stage IIb-IV melanoma.