SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Anixa Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: ANIX), a biotechnology company focused on using the body's immune system to fight cancer, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a Notice of Allowance for the first patent covering Anixa subsidiary, Certainty Therapeutics, Inc.'s, CAR-T cancer treatment technology.

The patent is titled "METHODS AND COMPOSITIONS FOR TREATING CANCER," and the inventors are Drs. Jose Conejo-Garcia and Alfredo Perales-Puchalt. Dr. Conejo-Garcia is the Chair of the Department of Immunology at Moffitt Cancer Center and Dr. Alfredo Perales-Puchalt is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in The Wistar Institute's Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center. The patent is assigned to The Wistar Institute and Anixa Biosciences' majority-owned subsidiary, Certainty Therapeutics, Inc. is the exclusive, world-wide licensee.

Dr. Amit Kumar, President and CEO of Anixa Biosciences, stated, "This is a ground-breaking patent protecting our CAR-T cancer technology. This technology takes advantage of specific hormone–hormone receptor biology to address malignancies and may hold promise to be the first successful CAR-T therapy against solid tumors. While our initial focus is the treatment of ovarian cancer, the technology covered by the patent is broad and may also be effective in treating other solid tumors by exploiting an anti-angiogenesis mechanism of action."

Dr. Kumar continued, "We are pleased that our licensor and shareholder in Certainty Therapeutics, Inc., The Wistar Institute, has received this Notice of Allowance, as this patent will offer intellectual property protection for the commercialization of this CAR-T solid tumor therapy. We have other filings at various stages of prosecution, and we hope to be receiving additional patents."  

"We take seriously our collaborative efforts in protecting intellectual property that is critical for the advancement of new therapies, such as Anixa's CAR-T therapy," said Heather Steinman, PhD, MBA, Vice President of Business Development at The Wistar Institute. "We are fully aligned with Anixa to ensure that Wistar's technology may one day be used to help cancer patients."

About Anixa Biosciences, Inc.
Anixa, a cancer-focused biotechnology company, is harnessing the body's immune system in the fight against cancer. Anixa is developing both diagnostics and therapeutics to detect cancer early, when it is most curable, and to treat those afflicted once diagnosed. It is developing the Cchek^TM platform, a series of inexpensive non-invasive blood tests for the early detection of solid tumors, which is based on the body's immune response to the presence of a malignancy. It is also developing chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) based immuno-therapy drugs which genetically engineer a patient's own immune cells to fight cancer. Anixa also continually examines emerging technologies in complementary or related fields for further development and commercialization. Additional information is available at www.anixa.com.

About The Wistar Institute
The Wistar Institute is an international leader in biomedical research with special expertise in cancer research and vaccine development. Founded in 1892 as the first independent nonprofit biomedical research institute in the United States, Wistar has held the prestigious Cancer Center designation from the National Cancer Institute since 1972. The Institute works actively to ensure that research advances move from the laboratory to the clinic as quickly as possible. wistar.org

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SOURCE Anixa Biosciences, Inc.