DCPrime BV

 
Brief description
DCPrime BV is a spin-off company of the VU university medical center (VUmc) in Amsterdam, and the company is based on a technology platform around unique sustainable dendritic cell (DC) lines that can replace current patient-derived DC vaccines. DCPrime’s mission is to become “the new generation DC company” which develops off-the-shelf DC-based products.

Problem in the market
The  goal of therapeutic cancer vaccines is to trigger the patient’s own immune system to fight back against cancer. Many different types of vaccines have been tried out, and dendritic cell-based vaccines have been used in active immunotherapy for more than 10 years. Clinical results however have been inconclusive, because of the difficulty of product standardization. The reason for that is that such vaccines are prepared from patient’s own blood. 

How does DC prime BV address the problem? 
DCPrime bypasses these problems by developing generic products that can be used in any patient. Unique patented culture processes for scalable manufacturing of functional DCs from sustainable cell lines have been developed by DCPrime, and these now make it possible to apply DCs as standardized off-the-shelf vaccines in the clinic. The DCPrime platform also has the advantage of offering numerous applications in additional R&D fields, and DCPrime exploits these opportunities to generate IP and income and validation of its platform.