Encouraging studies: personalized vaccine against kidney cancer

A personalized vaccine against advanced kidney cancer has shown encouraging results in a clinical trial, with all nine patients included generating an anticancer immune response after the first dose. The research, conducted at the Dana-Farber Institute in the US, was recently published in the journal Nature.

• Promising immune response in treated patients

The vaccine was administered after surgery to remove the tumor and is designed to help the immune system detect and eliminate any remaining tumor cells. After an average of 34.7 months, all treated patients were in complete remission.

The study included patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma in stages III and IV, and five of them received, in addition to the vaccine, ipilimumab, an immunotherapy treatment.

• Customized for each patient

The vaccine is customized to each patient's tumor. Researchers analyze tumor tissue taken during surgery and identify neoantigens, mutated proteins found exclusively in cancer cells. Based on these, the most effective targets are selected to trigger a strong immune response. "This approach is really distinct from other kidney cancer vaccine trials," explains Dr. David A. Braun, an oncologist and researcher at Yale University Cancer Center, who is also the study's lead author. "We choose targets that are unique to the cancer and different from any normal part of the body, so that the immune system can be effectively directed at the cancer in a very specific way. We learned which specific targets in the cancer are most susceptible to immune attack and showed that this approach can generate long-lasting immune responses, directing the immune system to recognize the cancer. We believe that this research can form the basis for the development of neoantigen peptide vaccines in kidney cancer," the doctor commented on the initial clinical results.

• Future prospects

Through a series of analyses, the team found that the vaccine induced an immune response within three weeks, the number of T cells induced by the vaccine increased by an average of 166 times, and these T cells remained in the body at high levels for up to three years. In vitro studies also showed that the T cells induced by the vaccine were active against the patient's own tumor cells. Side effects were minimal, manifested by redness at the injection site or mild flu-like symptoms. A large international study, testing a similar vaccine in combination with immunotherapy, is already underway. The researchers emphasize that an analysis on a larger sample of patients is needed to confirm the effectiveness of the treatment. This discovery opens new perspectives for the use of personalized vaccines in the treatment of kidney cancer and could revolutionize the immunotherapeutic approach to the disease.