Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Licenses Brain Vaccine Development to Pasadena-Based StemVax

StemVax Therapeutics, a Pasadena-based emerging biotechnology firm, has been awarded an exclusive worldwide license agreement from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for all of the intellectual property needed to commercialize the StemVax Glioblast brain tumor vaccine.

A report by Los Angeles Business Journal Thursday said StemVax, a unit of Innovest Global Inc. based in Cleveland, Ohio, has signed the agreement with Cedars-Sinai to develop the drug.

The report did not describe terms of the agreement.

Innovest announced the approved patent of the primary technology on July 25. Now, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the organization that filed for that patent, has provided StemVax the exclusive worldwide right to it and three other related intellectual properties filed subsequently for patent protection.

“The StemVax business model is a low cost, high output strategy of partnering with a major health organization to get the technology to market and start helping people,” Dr. Dwain Morris-Irvin, President of Innovest’s Biotech Division and Chief Science Officer at StemVax, said in a statement. “This agreement, which was negotiated over a nine-month period, is critical because we now has everything we need, and we have it all in-house.”

Irvin co-founded StemVax in 2014 and is co-author of the intellectual property.

StemVax is based at the Pasadena Bio Collaborative Incubator at 2265 E. Foothill Blvd., which also houses other bioscience startups in the City.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a non-profit hospital and academic health science center, employs over 2,000 physicians and are considered one of the top hospitals and research organizations in the world.

For more information about StemVax, visit www.stemvax.com.