Personalized Cancer Vaccines; type of personalized immunotherapy
A Personalized Vaccine is a type of personalized immunotherapy, designed to treat cancers that have already developed (as opposed to preventing cancer).
Tepthera was launched as a spin-off from the Institute of Molecular Health Sciences at the ETH Zurich in 2018. It will provide platform for the identification of T cell antigens. After the selection of antigens, the solution identifies tumor-specific epitopes and then monitors antigen-specific T cells.
The platform provides patients with individualized therapeutic vaccines for treating their condition. It will provide the basis for developing personalized therapies in various medical fields such as infectious diseases, autoimmunity and cancer immunotherapy. It is new approach in precision medicine which aims to tailor therapies and medical products for the individual.
Moderna and Merck jointly developed mRNA-4157 in 2016. mRNA-based personalized cancer vaccines to deliver one custom-tailored medicine for one patient at a time. It was identified by them that mutations found on a patient’s cancer cells, called neoepitopes. Neoepitopes can help the immune system distinguish cancer cells from normal cells. They predict 20 neoepitopes present on the patient’s cancer that should elicit the strongest immune response, based on unique characteristics of the patient’s immune system and the cancer's particular mutations.
They create a vaccine that encodes for each of these mutations and load them onto a single mRNA molecule. Once injected into the patient, the vaccine has the potential to direct the patient’s cells to express the selected neoepitopes. Thus, it may help the patient’s immune system better recognize cancer cells as foreign and destroy them. Presently, this vaccine is at clinical trial Phase 1.
The Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK developed Personalized cancer vaccine RO7198457. Personalized cancer vaccine RO7198457 and immunotherapy drug Atezolizumab was jointly administered to cancer patients. It was found that about 73 % of cancer patients gave positive responses. Also these results were presented and explained by lead researcher Juanita Lopez at the AACR Virtual Annual Meeting II (22–24 June 2020).