May is Brain Cancer Awareness Month and Rockville, MD based Immunomic is dedicated to raising awareness and advancing research for this devastating cancer. The facts are grim, over 700,000 Americans are living with a primary brain and central nervous system tumor and roughly 80,000 new cases of primary tumors are expected to be diagnosed this year, 4,800 of which will be children. Patients with glioblastoma (GBM) typically have a median survival rate of 15 months and have a high rate of reoccurrence, occurring in 90% of patients.

Research for new GBM treatment options has been notoriously slow. Immunomic recently announced an exciting licensing deal with Annias Immunotherapy which allows Immunomic to combine its investigational nucleic acid based immunotherapy platform, LAMP-Vax, with a patented and proprietary cytomegalovirus (CMV) immunotherapy platform, developed at Duke University by Drs. John H. Sampson and Duane A. Mitchell and licensed to Annias. This approach could harness the body’s immune system to recognize, attack and destroy tumor cells that express CMV, which is over-expressed in a variety of human cancers, including GBM.

Learn more about Immunomic’s new licensing deal and the company’s GBM research here.