ImmunAid, a private Australian-based biotech, has successfully completed its first capital raising over $1 million from independent arm's-length investors in the U.S., Europe and Australia.
The funding increases ImmunAid’s values to over $10 million, with the new investors holding 10% of the company. The company anticipates a second funding round will be offered to sophisticated investors later in 2012, after it achieves further clinical and patent successes.
The funding will allow ImmunAid to further monitor the immune cycle of individual patients to determine the optimal time to deliver treatment to that patient, the company’s key concept. The original concept was developed by inventor Martin Ashdown, who postulated that the immune system switches itself "on and off" in a continuous, repeating cycle in patients with certain diseases, including auto-immune disease, and that treatment should be timed to support the body's own efforts to fight off such disease.
ImmunAid began clinical trials in Australia and the U.S. give years ago, obtaining data that led to the granting of valuable patents to the company. These trials are now being expanded, including in Europe, where an important enabling patent was awarded to ImmunAid in late 2011.
The Mayo Clinic is currently conducting a clinical trial to further assess the influence of timed delivery of conventional chemotherapy for patients with cancer. Several hospitals and universities in Australia have conducted trials into the ImmunAid concepts on cancer and also certain other diseases, including multiple sclerosis and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
"Once we realized this immune cycle is real and measurable,” said Mervyn Jacobson, CEO of ImmunAid, “we postulated that the administration of chemotherapy and other anti-cancer therapies should be timed to work with each individual patient's immune system to attack that specific cancer in that specific patient. The results then spoke for themselves.”
Approximately $32 billion is spent globally each year on cancer drugs, yet the cancer mortality rate in the U.S. is more than 11,000 per week. An analysis of 63 clinical trials published since 2000 shows the average complete response rate (becoming cancer free) in late-stage patients across a wide range of cancers is 7%—precisely consistent with the algorithm now developed by ImmunAid.
