Personalized Vaccines Effective In Treating Melanoma

New findings published in the journal Science Express show that a vaccine could potentially prevent a powerful immune response against tumor mutations related to melanoma skin cancers.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine tailor-made the vaccines, giving them to three patients with advanced melanoma to boost the number of cancer-fighting T cells.

The vaccines were created through the sequence of genomes of patients' tumors as healthy proteins help to pinpoint any mutations that occur. Researchers then used a computer algorithim and lab tests to determine which neoantigens are most likely to create an immune response.

Patients whose tumors had been removed before they had metastasized were given the vaccine. Researchers observed them for a period, in which testing showed that the vaccines worked well for most patients.

"This proof-of-principle study shows that these custom-designed vaccines can elicit a very strong immune response," said senior author Gerald Linette, a Washington University medical oncologist leading the clinical trial at Siteman Cancer Center and Barnes-Jewish Hospital, in a news release. "The tumor antigens we inserted into the vaccines provoked a broad response among the immune system's killer T cells responsible for destroying tumors. Our results are preliminary, but we think the vaccines have therapeutic potential based on the breadth and remarkable diversity of the T-cell response."

The patients' blood was then drawn every week for about four months following vaccination. Samples were analzyed, showing that it had helped to create a diverse arm of T-cells against neoantigens. This suggest that the approach could even help activate certain types of cells to fight other cancers. However, other research will be necessary.

"Our team has developed a new strategy for personalized cancer immunotherapy," Linette concluded. "Many researchers have hypothesized that it would be possible to use neoantigens to broadly activate the human immune system, but we didn't know that for sure until now. We still have much more work to do, but this is an important first step and opens the door to personalized immune-based cancer treatments."