Personalized Vaccines For Ovarian Cancer To Enter Clinical Trials
By C. Rajan, contributing writer
University of Connecticut researchers have developed a novel method for making personalized vaccines to treat patients with ovarian cancer. The vaccines have shown success in mice models and will be entering the first clinical trial in humans in late 2014.
"This has the potential to dramatically change how we treat cancer," says Dr. Pramod Srivastava, director of the Carole and Ray Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center at UConn Health and one of the principal investigators on the study. "This research will serve as the basis for the first ever genomics-driven personalized medicine clinical trial in immunotherapy of ovarian cancer, and will begin at UConn Health this fall."
Following FDA approval, the clinical trial will be conducted by Dr. Angela Kueck, a gynecological oncologist at UConn Health, on 15 to 20 women with ovarian cancer. The researchers will first sequence DNA from the tumors of these patients, and then use UConn’s newly developed method to create a personalized vaccine for each patient.
The first trial will determine whether the personalized vaccines are safe and feasible. If this trial is successful, the researchers will plan a Phase 2 trial to determine if the vaccine can extend patients' lives.
The team’s new method for developing these personalized vaccines makes use of the protein sequences on cell surfaces, called epitopes, which the immune system uses to identify cells as healthy or cancerous cells. However, because most cancer epitopes are very similar to healthy cell epitopes, the immune system doesn’t identify them as the enemy and attack them.
Srivastava’s team realized that cancer cell epitopes do have several small, key defects that separate them from normal healthy cells. The researchers’ strategy was to exploit these differences in making a vaccine so the immune system could distinguish between the healthy and cancerous cells in order to defend itself.
When they inoculated mice with personalized vaccines made of cancer epitopes significantly different from normal tissue epitopes, the mice were very resistant to skin cancer.
According to the researchers, this approach could theoretically work for other cancers as well. The researchers chose ovarian cancer as a focus because this type of cancer initially responds well to surgery and chemotherapy, but often returns within a year or two. Thus, the researchers would be able to tell within a couple of years whether or not the vaccine was able to prevent the recurrence of the cancer.
The researchers have already applied for two patents for their new technique, and a spin-off company Accuragen has obtained an option to license the patents.
The study has been published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.