Latest Research
In 2001, two U.S. based non-profit organizations, the Cancer Research Institute and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, formed the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative, a unique global network of clinical trial sites with special expertise in immunology, built to centrally design and coordinate early-stage clinical trials to be run in parallel in order to identify more quickly the optimal combination of reagents, or vaccine components, necessary for a successful therapeutic cancer vaccine. The Cancer Vaccine Collaborative has to-date (June 2009) completed or is currently running more than 40 clinical trials of different therapeutic cancer vaccines, including 37 phase I, 6 phase II, and 1 fully randomized phase II clinical trials, and has published more than 130 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. Nearly all of these trials featured vaccines targeting various forms of the cancer-testes antigen, NY-ESO-1, a highly immunogenic, prototypical protein marker limited in expression to a wide variety of cancer types but not in normal tissue, with the exception of the immune-privileged testes. Vaccines tested in Cancer Vaccine Collaborative trials have induced integrated immune responses composed of target-specific antibodies and CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes, all of which are held to be essential for effective long-term control of cancer. Insights from these trials have generated a strong framework for the selection of components that will likely comprise an ideal therapeutic cancer vaccine, including: multiple cancer-antigens in various forms delivered with potent adjuvants and all administered in a prime-boost setting in conjunction with a modulator of cancer immunosuppression.
In June 2008, it was announced that United States doctors from the Clinical Research Division led by Cassian Yee at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have for the first time successfully treated a skin cancer patient by using immune cells cloned from his own immune system which were then re-injected into him. The patient, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind. Experts say that this case could be a landmark in the treatment of cancer in general. Larger trials are now under way.
More new research is being conducted by Drs. Richard O'Reilly and Michel Sadelain. Drs. O'Reilly and Sadelain have done extensive research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center hospital and are among leaders of the cancer adoptive Immunotherapy field
Read more about this topic: Cancer Immunotherapy
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