Penn team spotlights a pilot ovarian cancer trial and survival rates for a personalized cancer vaccine
A group of investigators at Penn are holding out hope that a new type of personalized tumor vaccine may break the crippling run of failures that blighted the first wave of cancer vaccines.
In a trial among 25 advanced ovarian cancer patients, researchers took autologous dendritic cells — a type of messenger cells that present antigen material to T cells — and pulsed them to whole-tumor cell lysate also from the patients. The patients then received a dose of these tumor-exposed dendritic cells every three weeks, up to six months. Almost half of the patients who could be evaluated showed a good response to the vaccine, as indicated by a big increase in the number of T cells specifically reactive to tumor material. The difference in 2-year overall survival rates between the “responder” patients and “non-responders”: 100% versus 25%.
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