Adiga Lifesciences announces positive data for Cat-PAD cat allergy vaccine

Adiga Lifesciences announces positive data for Cat-PAD cat allergy vaccine

- Published study indicates benefit of peptide immunotherapy for cat allergy

Oxford, UK, 8 January 2021: Adiga Lifesciences [“Adiga”], a company focussed on the clinical development of immunomodulatory assets, announces that a pilot study has shown that Adiga’s cat allergy vaccine, Cat-PAD, can reduce the systemic immune response and symptoms of allergic rhinitis in individuals with cat allergies.

Published in the journal Allergy, the study involved AllerGen and PROOF Centre of Excellence researchers from The University of British Columbia, McMaster University and Queen’s University. Dr. Scott Tebbutt, an AllerGen investigator, Professor in the Department of Medicine at The University of British Columbia, and CEO and Chief Scientific Officer at the PROOF Centre of Excellence, led the research.

Cat-PAD uses peptide immunotherapy to target the immune system and train it not to overreact to the cat allergen Fel d1 – a protein excreted in a cat’s skin, saliva, and urine. The study involved ten participants, all of whom had a confirmed cat allergy. Each received four injections of the immunotherapy vaccine over a three-month period. Their clinical responses to the therapy were then measured and it was found that overall participants had significant improvement in their nasal symptom scores and changes in the frequency of immune cells in their peripheral blood. The positive findings follow previous studies that found that one course of four CAT-PAD injections was shown to significantly reduce symptoms of cat allergy for up to two years. 1

Brenda Reynolds, Chief Executive Officer of Adiga Life Sciences, said: “Cat-PAD offers significant advantages over existing immunotherapies as it requires only four injections over three months, a significantly shorter course of therapy than existing allergy immunotherapy regimens. We are encouraged by the findings of this preliminary study which highlight the potential of our peptide immunotherapy technology in the treatment of allergy and modulation of the disease at a genetic level.”

Participants in the study were individuals with cat allergy who had at least eight hours per week of exposure to a cat in their daily lives throughout the study. At each of three visits (screening, pre-treatment, and post-treatment), participants were exposed to cat allergen by a nasal allergen challenge (NAC) designed to provoke allergy symptoms. The NAC model for allergic rhinitis was optimized and validated by AllerGen’s Allergic Rhinitis Clinical Investigator Collaborative (AR-CIC), led by Dr. Anne Ellis (Queen’s University), study co-author and clinical lead, and Dr. Helen Neighbour (McMaster University).

1 P Couroux et al, Fel d 1-derived synthetic peptide immuno-regulatory epitopes show a long-term treatment effect in cat allergic subjects, Clin. Exp. Allergy, May;45(5):974-981 2015