Preliminary results from a clinical trial conducted by the staff of the School of Medicine at the University of Washington in St. Louis indicate that a new personalized vaccine against myeloma can cause a powerful immune response and effectively combat melanoma.
Similar vaccines have tried to use before - they affect target proteins in certain cancer cells - but the old vaccines reacted to the same proteins that exist in healthy cells, which caused serious problems.
New vaccines were created based on the results of sequencing of the tumor genome of each patient, as well as genome sequencing of healthy cells.
This approach allowed scientists to identify neoantigens - unique proteins that in a particular case contain cancer cells, but which do not exist in the patient's healthy cells.
"You can imagine a neoantigen as a flag of a cancer cell. Each patient with melanoma has hundreds of different cellular flags. By identifying unique flags that only cancer cells carry, we can create a highly effective and safe vaccine for a specific patient with a specific type of tumor. This is a personalized approach, "says Dr. Beatriz Carreno, author of the study.
Three such patients with melanoma received such vaccines. After the introduction of the drug every week for 4 months, scientists took their blood for analysis. In each case, there was an increased number of T-lymphocytes capable of attacking cancer cells.
According to the researchers, the new personalized vaccine is able to stimulate the immune system and make it more active to attack lung cancer cells, bladder cancer, colorectal cancer and other tumors.
In patients who underwent surgical treatment but who had cancer cells to penetrate adjacent lymph nodes, they often expect the tumor to return. Therefore, scientists attach high hopes to immunotherapy for melanoma.
Efficacy and safety "Our research shows that these personalized vaccines can induce a very strong immune response. The unique antigens of the tumors that we injected into the vaccines produced a powerful reaction of T-killers, which are responsible for the destruction of tumor cells. Our results are preliminary, but we believe that the therapeutic potential of personalized vaccines is enormous, "said Dr. Gerald Linette, an oncology and chemotherapy specialist from the University of Washington, the organizer of the clinical trial at the Sternman Oncology Center at the Barnes Jewish Hospital in Saint- Louis).
After the apparent success of a personalized vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized Phase I trials in 6 patients. If during this work the effectiveness of the novelty is confirmed, including the ability to prevent relapse of the disease and destroy the remaining cancer cells after the operation, then perhaps the vaccine approval is not far off.
Nevertheless, the researchers express restrained optimism and say that one should learn more about the long-term effectiveness and safety of the vaccine.
Although so far no patients had serious side effects, they propose to wait for the final results.
"If it works, then our strategy will change personalized cancer immunotherapy. Many researchers have suggested that the use of neoantigens can effectively stimulate the immune system, but we were not sure of this until the last moment. We still have a lot of work to do, but this is an important and complex first step that opens up unprecedented opportunities, "says Dr. Linett medbe. en.
Keywords:.