Autologous Tumor Cell Vaccines: Inducing an immune response against tumor stem cells?

Hoag Cancer Center offers an innovative clinical trial that involves immunization with a patient’s own self-renewing, proliferating tumor cells. This approach probes deeply into the complexities of the human immune response, and tumor cell biology, utilizing information that was unknown to scientists until recently and is continually being expanded by the progressive research at Hoag Cancer Center.

Hoag is one of only a handful of cancer-research centers in the world performing clinical trials utilizing a patient’s own tumor cells growing in cell culture as part of a vaccine approach. In this study, some patients received injections with their irradiated tumor cells in an effort to induce the body’s own dendritic cells to orchestrate a tumor specific response. Other patients received a trial using their own dendritic cells that have been exposed to their irradiated tumor cells ex vivo. There are a number of patients treated by both of these approaches who are now long-term survivors despite the presence of metastatic melanoma or metastatic kidney cancer.

The encouraging outcomes observed with these two approaches were most recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Fall 2006) and in Cancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticals (Summer 2009)

"We are extremely gratified at the surprising number of patients who are alive and doing well after receiving these vaccines,” says Robert O. Dillman, M.D., medical and scientific director of Hoag Cancer Center. “These patients all had metastatic disease, and often experienced cancer disease progression, despite other therapies. We’re intrigued at the possibility that we may have been able to induce an immune response against tumor stem cells, the ones responsible for growing new tumors, in patients.”

Hoag continues to enroll patients with kidney cancer in the clinical trial investigating irradiated tumor cells plus dendritic cells (click here for details).

For patients with metastatic melanoma, enrollment in a new study has started that compares both approaches. The new trial, called “MAC-VAC” (Melanoma Autologous Cell Vaccine), is a randomized trial in which patients are treated with either an autologous tumor cell vaccine containing no dendritic cells or an autologous dendritic cell/tumor cell vaccine.

For more information about Hoag Clinical Trials, click here or call Hoag Cancer Center at 949/7-CANCER (722-6237).