Aethlon Medical, Inc. (NASDAQ: AEMD) shares eked ahead Monday. The company, a medical therapeutic company focused on developing products to treat cancer and life-threatening infectious diseases, today announced that, on August 6, the Bellberry Human Research Ethics Committee (BHREC) granted full ethics approval to the Pindara Private Hospital for a safety, feasibility and dose-finding clinical trial of the Hemopurifier® in patients with solid tumors who have stable or progressive disease during anti-PD-1 monotherapy treatment, such as Merck’s Keytruda® (pembrolizumab) or Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo® (nivolumab) (AEMD-2022-06 Hemopurifier Study).
The approval is valid for one year, until August 6, 2025. The trial will be conducted by Dr. Marco Matos and his staff at the Pindara Private Hospital, located in Queensland, Australia.
Currently, only approximately 30% of cancer patients who receive pembrolizumab or nivolumab treatment for solid tumors will have lasting clinical responses to these agents. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) produced by tumors have been implicated in resistance to anti-PD-1 therapies as well as the spread of cancers. The Aethlon Hemopurifier has been designed to bind and remove these EVs from the bloodstream, which may improve therapeutic response rates to anti-PD-1 antibodies. In preclinical studies, the Hemopurifier has been shown to reduce the number of exosomes in cancer patient plasma samples.
AEMD shares took on 0.19 cents to 30.19 cents.