A personalized cancer vaccine developed with the help of a Mount Sinai computational platform raised no safety concerns and showed potential benefit in patients with different cancers, including lung and bladder, that have a high risk of recurrence, according to results from an investigator-initiated phase I clinical trial presented during the virtual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2021, held April 10-15.
“While immunotherapy has revolutionized the treatment of cancer, the vast majority of patients do not experience a significant clinical response with such treatments,” said study author Thomas Marron, MD, PhD, Assistant Director for Early Phase and Immunotherapy Trials at The Tisch Cancer Institute and Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Cancer vaccines, which typically combine tumor-specific targets that the immune system can learn to recognize and attack to prevent recurrence of cancer. The vaccine also contains an adjuvant that primes the immune system to maximize the efficacy.”
To generate the personalized cancer vaccine, Dr. Marron and colleagues sequenced each patient’s tumor and germline DNA and tumor RNA. They also identified the patient’s tumor-specific target to help predict whether the patient’s immune system would recognize the vaccine’s targets.
