Cancer Vaccines: Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride?

Extract

The saying “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride” is apt for therapeutic cancer vaccines, which manage to garner excitement in early trials but despite many attempts do not achieve clinical efficacy. “This is an area that has been studied for a very long time, but there are, to my knowledge, no effective therapeutic vaccines for cancer,” said Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., chief of surgery and head of the tumor immunology section at the National Cancer Institute, who has been studying immunotherapy for more than 30 years.

Perhaps this time things will change. In the wake of many disappointments, new vaccine approaches have reached late-stage development, having conceivably learned from the pitfalls of predecessors.

In an August 2012 Nature Medicine study, researchers demonstrated early promise of IMA901, a 10-peptide therapeutic vaccine for renal cell cancer (RCC). Harpreet Singh-Jasuja, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Immatics Biotechnologies, based in Germany, and colleagues developed the vaccine by isolating antigens directly from RCC patients’ primary tumors.