UbiVac CEO Participates in Cancer Vaccine Panel at SynBioBeta & Wilson Sonsini Investment Forum

AI will accelerate discovery, but the breakthrough is off‑the‑shelf vaccines targeting shared Dark‑Genome drivers—paired with nextgen immunotherapy combinations

PALO ALTO AND SAN JOSE, CA, UNITED STATES, May 8, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- At SynBioBeta, Bernard A. Fox, PhD—Founder and CEO of UbiVac—will join a distinguished panel on accelerating vaccine innovation through AI and synthetic biology, spotlighting UbiVac’s off the shelf, universal vaccines that target cancer’s Dark Genome “Dark Matter” antigens. He will also attend the Wilson Sonsini Life Sciences Investment Forum, where UbiVac seeks partners to advance its Dark Matter combination therapy that has tripled response rates in HNSCC.

UbiVac's Disruptive Immunotherapy

UbiVac’s proprietary DRibbles^® technology is a self adjuvanting microvesicle vaccine that packages >300 tumor associated and Dark Genome–derived antigens together with endogenous toll like receptor (TLR) and danger signal agonists. This “single shot toolbox” primes broad, durable immunity and helps tumors avoid immune escape, giving the platform plug and play versatility across solid cancers. In a Phase I combination immunotherapy trial, DRibbles tripled overall and complete response rates—early proof of its clinical power.

DRibbles in the Clinic

DPV-001, the lead DRibble platform vaccine is in the clinic for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) and has been tested in small phase 1 and pilot studies for non-small cell lung, triple negative breast, and prostate cancers. These studies provided formulation, mechanism of action, and safety data. Blood samples from those studies are being used for dark matter target discovery. Because its antigen repertoire mirrors many shared targets across solid tumors, DPV-001 was specifically engineered to address high need indications such as pancreatic, ovarian, glioblastoma, and gastric cancers. Next generation programs for melanoma and thyroid cancer have been initiated. UbiVac aims to deliver "off-the-shelf" cancer vaccines that combine seamlessly with checkpoint inhibitors, cell therapies, or standard of care regimens—raising response rates and extending survival across multiple tumor types.

About Cancer’s Dark Matter

Cancer’s dark matter represents a spectrum of previously unknown proteins that have recently been identified as antigens expressed on the surface of cancer cells but not on normal cells or the thymus. Some of these dark matter proteins appear to be responsible for cancer’s malignant properties, making them valuable targets for an anti-cancer immune response. UbiVac believes DPV-001 is the first cancer immunotherapy to include cancer’s dark matter in a form that can induce a destructive anti-cancer immune response and established its therapeutic efficacy in more than a decade’ worth of preclinical studies. The first description of the "in-patient" development of a T cell receptor (TCR) to a dark genome-derived dark matter antigen was presented earlier this week at the American Association of Immunologists annual meeting.

About DPV-001

UbiVac’s DRibble Platform Vaccine (DPV) technology is a novel first-in-class cancer vaccine immunotherapy. DPV-001 was developed to be used as combination immunotherapy for most solid cancers, including cancers of the breast, lung, prostate, stomach, colon, pancreas, ovary, brain, and others. DPV-001 contains recently described non-canonical, non-mutated shared alternative neoantigens, also termed cancer’s “dark matter”, plus more than 300 antigens overexpressed by the average solid cancer. This allows DPV-001 to be available off-the-shelf without having to manufacture a patient specific vaccine. Additionally, DPV-001 can be administered without having to match a patients HLA tissue antigens.

About UbiVac

UbiVac is a privately held, Clinical Stage Immunotherapy & Cancer Target Discovery Company, with First-in-Human Combination Immunotherapies that Include Cancer’s Dark Matter - the Newly Discovered Non-Mutated Shared Alternative Cancer Neoantigens derived from the dark genome.

DPV-001 is UbiVac’s lead agent and is a first-in-class platform technology that couples an off-the-shelf DC-targeted microvesicle containing cancer’s dark matter plus more than 300 cancer antigens for most adenocarcinomas and squamous cell cancers. DPV-001 also contains multiple TLR/NOD agonists and DAMPs that are effective at supporting anti-cancer immune responses. UbiVac believes that DPV-001 is highly complementary to current and developing immunotherapy, adoptive immunotherapy, chemotherapy and small molecule drug portfolios, and preliminary clinical data suggests it may be effective at increasing response rates in patients that have failed to respond to anti-PD-1/anti-PD-L1. UbiVac also has a pipeline of agents under development for the treatment of melanoma and thyroid cancer, and to prevent cancer in patients at high risk of developing disease.

Bernard A. Fox
UbiVac
+1 971-413-7139
dr.fox@ubivac.com
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