Personalized Kidney Cancer Vaccine May Help Prevent Future Relapse

A personalized cancer vaccine has been shown to help prevent future relapse among patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma, a type of kidney cancer, according to data from a phase 1 clinical trial published in Nature.

Among the nine patients with stage 3 and 4 clear cell renal cell carcinoma who were enrolled onto the trial, a successful anti-cancer immune response was observed with the personalized cancer vaccine following the surgical removal of patients’ tumors. At a median data cut-off of 34.7 months, or nearly three years, all patients remained cancer-free.

Co-senior author Dr. Catherine Wu, chief of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in Boston, Massachusetts, sat down for an interview with CURE® where she highlighted findings from the phase 1 trial, detailing what these results may mean for patients.

Transcript:

The concept of the study is to create a personal therapy, so one that is individualized for each patient; that is built on the recognition that we know by now that each patient’s tumor is not a monolithic population. It's got many different sub-populations that form the cancer population. What that means is that if you just hit [the disease] with one thing, it ends up being a little bit like a game of whack-a-mole. You didn't address the entirety of the tumor. You might have addressed a part of it, but not all of it, and so that sets the stage for future relapse.

So, what we are trying to do with our personalized therapy is design with respect to the characteristics of the individual tumor, and launch a multi-pronged attack so that in aggregate, we are addressing the whole population. The way that we do that is we sequence the tumor and identify all the mutations. We have a process by which we can predict which one of those mutations could generate something that could stimulate the immune system, and then we create a cocktail of peptides [that is], again, personal for that individual. This [will then] hopefully address the entirety of the tumor, and that's what we're giving in a syringe.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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Reference:

“A neoantigen vaccine generates antitumour immunity in renal cell carcinoma” by Dr. David A. Braun et al., Nature.