Cancer vaccine together with immunotherapy reduces liver tumor, says study

Almost a third of patients with liver cancer advanced who received a personalized vaccine developed by Geneos Therapeutics along with an immunotherapy drug in a small, initial clinical trial saw their tumors shrink, according to a report from US researchers last Sunday (7).

The result was approximately double the response usually seen with immunotherapy alone, according to the researchers.

Preliminary study results, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research in San Diego and published in the journal Nature Medicinesuggest that vaccines based on mutations present only in a patient's tumor could boost the immune system's ability to recognize and attack difficult-to-treat cancers.

The findings, which need to be confirmed in a larger study, bring the industry even closer to effective cancer vaccines after many past failures, and could expand the types of cancers these therapies can treat.

Partners such as Moderna and Merck & Co, among others, have seen promising results combining personalized vaccines with immunotherapy to prevent skin cancer from returning in patients after surgery.

For the study, researchers used samples of patients' tumors to construct vaccines based on neoantigens — new mutations present only in an individual patient's tumor. The goal was to train the immune system to attack and kill only these unique proteins, leaving healthy tissue intact.

Unlike skin cancer, which has too many mutations for the body to recognize, liver cancer is considered a cold cancer because it contains fewer mutations, which has made immunotherapies less effective.

“This vaccine essentially educates the immune system to recognize antigens that it has ignored,” says study leader Mark Yarchoan of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

The study involved 36 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common form of liver cancer. Patients received custom-made vaccines along with Merck's Keytruda, a widely used immunotherapy considered the standard of care at the time.

Nearly a third of patients treated with the combination therapy (30.1%) experienced tumor shrinkage, with three of these patients having a complete response, meaning there are no detectable signs of the tumor remaining after a median follow-up of 21.5 months. .

This compares with the typical response of about 12% to 18% in liver cancer patients who receive immunotherapy alone. “This certainly suggests that the vaccine has actually added clinical efficacy,” says Yarchoan. The most common adverse effect was mild reactions at the injection site. There were no serious adverse events.

Unlike many vaccine candidates based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, Geneos' treatment is a DNA vaccine, in which the genetic code for mutated proteins is injected into cells using a small electrical impulse. Each vaccine can target up to 40 mutated genes.

Yarchoan said larger studies are planned but declined to provide details.

Source: CNN Brasil

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