Evaxion to unveil AI-powered cancer vaccine concept

Evaxion, a leader in AI-based biotech, will be going to this year's ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress and showing off a customizable cancer vaccine development system that's powered by in-house AI technology. The system uses AI to look over a patient's data, with a focus on a unique target; ERV tumor antigens that show a pattern of being shared across multiple patients. What this essentially boils down to is actually pretty simple; the AI will look for antigens, which trigger the body to produce immunity, that are shared between multiple cancer patients, and reconfigure them into a vaccine fit for each different type of cancer, and in some cases, for each individual patient. 

Evaxion is tight-lipped about what goes into the development of its proprietary AI systems. What the company does put out there is that it has developed four different models, which are made to work in concert in this product. The EDEN model is made to search for antigens that will trigger the kind of immune response that can banish a bacterial infection. OBSERV is made to compliment a patient's existing antigens, with a focus on ERVs, remnants of ancient immunities that have been left inscribed on the human genome over the millennia. PIONEER, meanwhile, is made to look for patient-specific antigens that can be activated through immunotherapy. Finally, RAVEN is a model used to check the efficacy of possible vaccine candidates. Put together, these models should, in theory, be capable of identifying the best possible immune treatment for a specific cancer patient.

Evaxion is calling this system AI-Immunology, and has been banking hard on it from the company's beginnings. Since going public and getting a wide crop of investors on board in 2021, Evaxion has managed to snag some big deals from big names. One of the larger and more recent is a deal with American pharma company Merck & Co., which is milestone-based and could see Evaxion being handed well over $1 billion, if all goes well. The company's commercial portfolio currently includes vaccines against Staph and gonorrhea, to name just a couple.