Personalized Therapeutic Vaccine induced the Immune System to Fight Kidney Cancer

Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!

"All nine patients with advanced kidney cancer in an early-phase trial of a personalized therapeutic vaccine had successful anti-cancer immune responses and remained cancer-free approximately three years after treatment. A therapeutic vaccine is used after disease sets in, aiming to induce immunity to alter the course of disease.

Each patient’s vaccine was created with information found by examining the DNA and RNA in the patient’s tumor, which identified mutations that were only found in the cancer. Like all vaccines, personalized cancer vaccines (PCVs) train the body’s immune system to recognize and destroy a threat. In this case, the threat was any cancer cells remaining after surgery. ..."

From the abstract:

"Personalized cancer vaccines (PCVs) can generate circulating immune responses against predicted neoantigens. However, whether such responses can target cancer driver mutations, lead to immune recognition of a patient’s tumour and result in clinical activity are largely unknown. These questions are of particular interest for patients who have tumours with a low mutational burden.

Here we conducted a phase I trial ... to test a neoantigen-targeting PCV in patients with high-risk, fully resected clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC; stage III or IV) with or without ipilimumab administered adjacent to the vaccine.

At a median follow-up of 40.2 months after surgery, none of the 9 participants enrolled in the study had a recurrence of RCC.

No dose-limiting toxicities were observed. All patients generated T cell immune responses against the PCV antigens, including to RCC driver mutations in VHL, PBRM1, BAP1, KDM5C and PIK3CA. Following vaccination, there was a durable expansion of peripheral T cell clones. Moreover, T cell reactivity against autologous tumours was detected in seven out of nine patients. Our results demonstrate that neoantigen-targeting PCVs in high-risk RCC are highly immunogenic, capable of targeting key driver mutations and can induce antitumor immunity. These observations, in conjunction with the absence of recurrence in all nine vaccinated patients, highlights the promise of PCVs as effective adjuvant therapy in RCC."

Personalized Therapeutic Vaccine ‘Steers’ the Immune System to Fight Kidney Cancer < Yale School of Medicine

A neoantigen vaccine generates antitumour immunity in renal cell carcinoma (open access)

Fig. 1: Vaccine manufacturing process and clinical outcomes.