In This Article:
All nine patients in a Phase I investigator-led trial of a personalised kidney cancer vaccine have successfully generated anti-cancer immune responses following tumour removal surgery.
Researchers from the US-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute administered the NeoVax personalised cancer vaccine to all nine patients with stage III or IV clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) following tumour removal surgery.
Results published this week in the journal Nature saw all nine patients involved in the trial (NCT02950766) remaining cancer-free at the cut-off point of 34.7 months.
The vaccines are personalised by way of neoantigens extracted from the patient’s tumour tissue during tumour removal surgery, with predictive algorithms used to determine which neoantigens to include in the vaccine based on the likelihood of inducing an immune response. The vaccine then teaches the patient’s body to combat leftover cancer cells and prevent them from resurfacing.
Dr Patrick Ott, director of the Center for Cancer Vaccines at the Dana-Farber Institute, said: “We observed a rapid, substantial and durable expansion of new T-cell clones related to the vaccine.
“These results support the feasibility of creating a highly immunogenic personalised neoantigen vaccine in a lower mutation burden tumour and are encouraging, though larger scale studies will be required to fully understand the clinical efficacy of this approach.”
Researchers saw the NeoVax vaccine inducing an immune response within three weeks, with the number of vaccine-induced T cells increasing 166-fold. Additionally, in vitro studies also showed that the vaccine-induced T cells were active against the patient’s tumour cells.
The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute collaborated with Gateway for Cancer Research, the US Department of Defense, Yale Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School for the Phase I study.
Dr David Braun, physician-scientist at Yale Cancer Center and first author of the study, said: “This approach is truly distinct from vaccine attempts in kidney cancer.
“We pick targets that are unique to the cancer and different from any normal part of the body, so the immune system can be effectively ‘steered’ towards the cancer in a very specific way.
“We learned which specific targets in the cancer are most susceptible to immune attack and demonstrated that this approach can generate long-lasting immune responses, directing the immune system to recognise cancer. We believe this work can form a foundation for the development of neoantigen vaccines in kidney cancer.”
The institute says that it launched a study into the world of personalised vaccines eight years ago after the system demonstrated some success in keeping cancer cells under control as part of a study into melanoma.