Provectus Biopharmaceuticals Announces Notice of Allowance of First U.S. Patent of Rose Bengal Sodium for Use as Anticancer and Antiviral Vaccine Adjuvant

KNOXVILLE, TN, Dec. 18, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Provectus (OTCQB: PVCT) today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has allowed patent application 17/488,430, titled “Halogenated Xanthenes as Vaccine Adjuvants.” The allowed patent application covers the use of Provectus’s pharmaceutical-grade rose bengal sodium (RBS) drug substance as an adjuvant in anticancer, antiviral, and possibly other vaccines to potentially make them work better by enhancing T-cell response.

The allowed application would be Provectus’s first patent award in the field of vaccines from the USPTO. Innovate Calgary, the innovation company of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, is a co-assignee. Aru Narendran, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics, Oncology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Physiology and Pharmacology at the University’s Cumming School of Medicine is a co-inventor. The research underlying the allowed application was led by Dr. Narendran and his lab team (the Narendran Lab).

Preclinical data from ongoing research on the potential use of investigational cancer immunotherapy PV-10 (rose bengal sodium) as a vaccine adjuvant was the subject of a poster presentation by the Narendran Lab at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 2023 annual meeting. A copy of the SITC 2023 poster, titled “The iodinated fluorescein derivative PV-10 enhances the antiviral activity of CD8+ T-Cells by inducing STING dimerization: Implications for enhanced vaccine applications,” is available on Provectus’s website at https://www.provectusbio.com/media/docs/2023-SITC-poster.pdf.

The Narendran Lab previously discovered that PV-10 activated stimulator of interferon (IFN) genes (STING), demonstrating its potential as a vaccine adjuvant in PV-10-mediated systemic anti-tumor immune responses. This work, titled “Association of Heat Shock Proteins as Chaperone for STING: A potential link in a key immune activation mechanism revealed by a novel anticancer agent PV-10” was the subject of a poster presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting II. A copy of the AACR 2020 poster is available on Provectus’s website at: https://www.provectusbio.com/media/docs/publications/AACR-2020_meeting ....