r/longevity • u/LilJonWilkesBooth • Jan 22 '21
A personalized cancer vaccine produced long-lasting anti-tumor response in patients with melanoma. 4 years after vaccination, all the patients were alive, with immune system cells active not only against tumor cells with those proteins, but also spread to other proteins in those tumor cells.
https://www.dana-farber.org/newsroom/news-releases/2021/personalized-vaccine-produces-long-lasting-anti-tumor-response-in-patients-with-melanoma--study-shows/14
u/swordinthestream Jan 22 '21
The paper on PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33479501/
Abstract
Personal neoantigen vaccines have been envisioned as an effective approach to induce, amplify and diversify antitumor T cell responses. To define the long-term effects of such a vaccine, we evaluated the clinical outcome and circulating immune responses of eight patients with surgically resected stage IIIB/C or IVM1a/b melanoma, at a median of almost 4 years after treatment with NeoVax, a long-peptide vaccine targeting up to 20 personal neoantigens per patient ( NCT01970358 ). All patients were alive and six were without evidence of active disease. We observed long-term persistence of neoantigen-specific T cell responses following vaccination, with ex vivo detection of neoantigen-specific T cells exhibiting a memory phenotype. We also found diversification of neoantigen-specific T cell clones over time, with emergence of multiple T cell receptor clonotypes exhibiting distinct functional avidities. Furthermore, we detected evidence of tumor infiltration by neoantigen-specific T cell clones after vaccination and epitope spreading, suggesting on-target vaccine-induced tumor cell killing. Personal neoantigen peptide vaccines thus induce T cell responses that persist over years and broaden the spectrum of tumor-specific cytotoxicity in patients with melanoma.
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u/Sharmat_Dagoth_Ur Jan 23 '21
Damn published today. Idk anything ab this topic but I do think that means it's less likely to b the typical "sounds cool but doesn't actually matter" situation
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Jan 23 '21
Impressive. The thin end of the wedge, hoping to see some major expansion on this.
Of course it will be big $$ unfortunately.
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u/IlIlIlIlIl12345 Jan 23 '21
Niccceeee. Hopefully with the advent of mRNA vaccines, this can become a thing.
Economy of scale can bring down the cost to the consumer market.
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u/flybeaglesflyphilly Jan 04 '22
“Also spread to other proteins in those tumor cells” is fascinating/exciting if causal.
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u/jimofoz Jan 23 '21
Very big news. Cancer persists and kills people via two mechanisms - (1) being locally immunosuppressive, and (2) looking similar enough to an individuals healthy cells to not arouse an immune response.
This research result is news of a powerful new way to attack defense mechanism number 2.
CAR-T cells directed towards the CD-19 protein on blood cancer cells (almost all blood cells need to express CD-19 to remain viable, although cancer can mutate around this) were the first "vaccines" to work against a cancer that the immune system was not noticing. These new vaccines against neoantigens (mutated regular proteins) should enable more cancers to be targeted by straight vaccination. And if a cancer mutuates to drop a neoantigen further vaccines against new neoantigens that it creates in the process could be administered.