GlobeImmune® is a private biopharmaceutical company developing novel treatments for infectious diseases and cancer. GlobeImmune has two products in randomized phase 2b clinical trials: GI-5005, a potential treatment for chronic hepatitis C (HCV) infection, is being developed in combination with the current standard of care - pegylated interferon and ribavirin. GI-4000 is being evaluated in patients with cancers caused by mutations in the Ras oncogene product. To date, these products have been well-tolerated, and early studies indicate that they generate antigen-specific T cell immune responses and improve clinical outcomes in patients. Tarmogens are produced using fermentation processes which can be simply and economically scaled up to commercial levels.
All of the Company's Tarmogen® products are developed from its proprietary platform technology. Tarmogens, a contraction of targeted molecular immunogens, are whole, heat-killed recombinant Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast that have been engineered to produce one or more target disease proteins, or antigens, inside the yeast. These target antigens distinguish diseased cells from normal cells, and can include viral proteins, mutated proteins unique to cancer cells and proteins that are over-expressed in cancer cells. Tarmogens activate T cells capable of locating and destroying the target cancer or virally-infected cells containing the same target antigen