US: Breakthrough kidney cancer vaccine development

Clinical trial results show that a vaccine against a factor called a neoantigen may help prevent the recurrence of kidney cancer.

According to News Medical, a research team led by scientists from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (USA) has successfully clinically tested a personalized cancer vaccine targeting neoantigens to fight renal cell carcinoma.

US: Breakthrough kidney cancer vaccine development Picture 1

A vaccine under study could prevent kidney cancer tumors from "reappearing" - Illustration: NEWS-MEDICAL

Neoantigens are a type of antigen produced by tumor cells, resulting from specific mutations.

Therefore, according to the research team, a personalized vaccine against neoantigens has the potential to induce immune responses to cancer cell-specific antigenic determinants.

They have developed a vaccine that uses that mechanism. After initial successful trials, they have just entered phase I clinical trials and achieved very good results.

Volunteers participating in the study were patients with kidney cancer who had undergone surgical removal of the tumor and were assessed as having a high risk of recurrence.

After a median of 40 months after surgery and 34 months after starting the vaccine, none of the patients had a recurrence of cancer, according to results published in the journal Nature.

Most patients vaccinated against the neoantigen were highly immunogenic. Vaccination also resulted in a sustained expansion of new T cell clones years after the last dose, indicating a durable immune response.

Scientists are still working to move toward larger clinical trials, including controlled trials with other relapse prevention therapies.

Nevertheless, the initial results are enough to show that personalized vaccines targeting neoantigens are a promising new door in the field of cancer.