Oxford-based cancer vaccine company Infinitopes closes $35 million seed round

Infinitopes and its ITOP1 cancer vaccine

Infinitopes is choosing targets by looking at what tumours actually display to the immune system. Its platform uses immunopeptidomics, identifying peptides presented on HLA molecules by mass spectrometry, then using computational methods to prioritise which of those antigens look most broadly relevant across patients.

Its lead candidate, ITOP1, is an off-the-shelf precision cancer vaccine candidate that aims to generate CD8+ cytotoxic T-cell responses against tumour antigens. 

The timing is also part of what defines the approach as ITOP1 integrates into standard perioperative care, with the vaccine given in a prime-boost schedule around chemotherapy and surgery, to help the immune system target residual disease after tumour resection. That sets the vaccine up as a recurrence-prevention strategy rather than a last-line treatment, and it lets the company assess whether immune priming translates into measurable clinical and immune signals. 

What landscape is Infinitope stepping into?

Therapeutic cancer vaccines have a track record of mixed clinical outcomes with repeated late-stage disappointments across multiple platforms and indications, which is part of why vaccines spent years in the shadow of other strategies. 

Interest in therapeutic cancer vaccines has picked up again, though. Moderna and Merck are part of this renewed momentum as they reported yesterday five-year follow-up data showing that their personalised mRNA vaccine, given with Keytruda, continued to reduce the risk of recurrence or death by 49% in resected high-risk melanoma. 

In practice, two design philosophies now dominate the space. One is the personalised neoantigen approach, where each vaccine is designed around an individual patient’s tumour-specific mutations, which can make manufacturing and scalability challenging. The other is off-the-shelf or shared-antigen strategies that aim for scalability by using fixed antigen sets expected to apply to many patients. Infinitopes sits in this second group, with ITOP1 positioned as an off-the-shelf vaccine built around antigens selected from what tumours present to the immune system.

And while the space isn’t crowded, Infinitopes isn’t the only company advancing off-the-shelf cancer vaccines. BioNTech, for example, has advanced programs such as its melanoma candidate BNT111, which relies on a fixed set of tumour-associated antigens delivered as mRNA. However, BioNTech recently discontinued the program despite some positive phase 2 results, but its cancer vaccine platform, FixVac, is still active with other candidates currently in trial. A closer conceptual comparison would be Nouscom, which is developing NOUS-209, an off-the-shelf viral-vector vaccine built around shared neoantigens found in microsatellite-instability (MSI) tumours.  

The risk-reward is still very real in this segment, even within off-the-shelf vaccines. Late-stage disappointment can quickly translate into strategic restructuring, and it has. IO Biotech’s recent setbacks and resulting cost-cutting are an example of that. The question around Infinitopes is whether its off-the-shelf precision vaccine can generate a clear, durable clinical signal when moved earlier into perioperative settings.