Vaxon Biotech is developing therapeutic vaccines that stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells without harming normal tissue, for a range of indications including prostate, lung, breast, hepatocellular, pancreatic and colon cancer. Based near Paris, Vaxon says it is the first company to develop therapeutic vaccines to treat existing cancers using optimized cryptic peptides, which appear to escape tolerance mechanisms, suggesting their potential in cancer immunotherapy.

Therapeutic vaccines derived from antigenic peptides have yet to demonstrate significant efficacy, particularly in cancer. Over the past eight years, a series of observations has led a small group of companies to believe that heat shock proteins possess unique properties that could make them useful adjuvants in vaccines designed to generate specific immune responses against cancers and infectious agents.