by Colleen Fleiss on September 24, 2023

In patients diagnosed with advanced-stage, drug-resistant ovarian cancer, the combination of a personalized cancer vaccine with adoptive T cell therapy (ACT) holds potential advantages .

Personalized Vaccine and ACT Control Ovarian Cancer

According to the study published in Nature Cancer journal, combining the personalized cancer vaccine with ACT yielded control of the disease within three months in 12 of 17 patients and the treatment was also found to be safe and relatively well tolerated.

Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer affects both the ovaries and is referred to as the ''silent killer'' as the symptoms go unnoticed until the disease advances.

Researchers analyzed responses to the combination therapy of 18 patients with advanced ovarian cancer who had previously participated in a clinical trial evaluating a therapeutic regimen that incorporated the personalized cancer vaccine developed by the institute itself. During the study, patients were given an infusion of their own vaccine-primed, circulating immune cells (specifically, T cells), followed by multiple periodic doses of their personalized vaccines.

"This treatment could not eliminate tumors, but it did provide considerable benefit to many of the patients, who had all undergone extensive treatment prior to enrolling in the trial and were in the late stages of the disease," said Lana Kandalaft, one of the researchers.

Women and Cancer

Cancer is one of the frequently talked about and most feared disease that falls under the genre of lifestyle diseases that have evolved, rather rapidly, in the past two decades.

"Ovarian cancer, like many other malignancies, has so far proved largely resistant to immunotherapies, most of which harness killer T cells, which destroy sick and infected cells. Ovarian cancer cells do, however, express neoantigens, which are randomly mutated proteins that can activate anti-tumor T cell responses, the study mentioned. We were very happy that we could demonstrate how the combination therapy improved anti-tumor immune responses, and that those changes correlated to patient benefit," said Sara Bobisse, senior author of the study.

According to George Coukos, one of the authors of the study, this study illustrates how rational approaches to the design of immunotherapies can help overcome the barriers to immune responses that are erected by a variety of cancers, not least ovarian cancer.

Reference :

  1. A phase 1 trial of adoptive transfer of vaccine-primed autologous circulating T cells in ovarian cancer -(https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-023-00623-x)