Phase 1 trial shows safety and efficacy of personalized vaccine for lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma

A team of researchers from City of Hope^®, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the U.S., and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, have reported safety and efficacy results from a Phase 1 trial that featured a personalized vaccine to treat lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma, a rare and slow-growing type of blood cancer, according to a study published recently in Nature Communications.

Toxicity among trial participants was also limited, Dr. Kwak said. That's because the vaccine uses patient-specific biologic components called tumor neoantigens that can help the body mount an immune response to a particular tumor type.

"Using sophisticated technology called single-cell sequencing, we could see that these personalized vaccines activated T cells in the tumor microenvironment, which help destroy tumor cells," said Dr. Kwak, who is also the deputy director of City of Hope's comprehensive cancer center and the Dr. Michael Friedman Professor in Translational Medicine. "Furthermore, we saw that the tumor cells rely on signaling from myeloid cells to survive, which we didn't know before, and the vaccine reduced that protumoral signaling, too."

According to Dr. Kwak, disease progression was halted and one patient had a minor reduction in tumor shrinkage. The research teams believe this is because two different subtypes of cells give rise to tumors in lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma -; mature B cells and plasma cells -; and the vaccine only had an effect on the B cell population.

The neoantigen vaccine research builds upon three decades of investigations by Dr. Kwak, who is a world-renowned physician and pioneering scientist in immunology and cancer vaccines. Dr. Kwak was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2010 for his work in cancer immunology.

In 2011, Dr. Kwak and colleagues published research in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on the first iteration of the neoantigen vaccine. It was a protein-based vaccine for follicular lymphoma that garnered positive results.

"It was actually one of the first positive cancer vaccine positive trials in the field, but 15 years ago, no drug company was interested in talking with us about a personalized vaccine," Dr. Kwak said. He noted that the "one drug for one patient" model was a tough sell until CAR T cell therapies set a precedent for individualized cancer medicines. "Now they're much more open to it. I think the future of cancer vaccines is really in this kind of setting, where we've shown the effectiveness of early intervention as a way to prolong and maybe even prevent progression to symptomatic disease."

Source:

City of Hope