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%.

With this ap­proach, the team from Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia and the Lau­sanne branch of the Lud­wig In­sti­tute for Can­cer Re­search says the vac­cine is primed with the unique set of mu­ta­tions in an in­di­vid­ual tu­mor. Giv­en its ex­po­sure to the whole tu­mor, it can stim­u­late im­mune re­sponse against not just one but “hun­dreds or thou­sands” of tu­mor-as­so­ci­at­ed tar­gets. It is al­so tu­mor-spe­cif­ic, mean­ing the vac­cine-in­duced T cells would be less like­ly to at­tack healthy cells.

To be sure, the study was de­signed pri­mar­i­ly to as­sess safe­ty and fea­si­bil­i­ty. But see­ing that a pa­tient who start­ed with stage 4 ovar­i­an can­cer (and five pri­or cours­es of chemother­a­py) re­mained dis­ease-free for five years af­ter two years of dos­ing, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors think it can prove an ef­fec­tive ap­proach to fight­ing can­cer, es­pe­cial­ly when paired up with oth­er im­munother­a­pies.

“This vac­cine ap­pears to be safe for pa­tients, and elic­its a broad an­ti-tu­mor im­mu­ni­ty — we think it war­rants fur­ther test­ing in larg­er clin­i­cal tri­als,” said lead au­thor Janos Tanyi in a state­ment about the study, pub­lished in Sci­ence Trans­la­tion­al Med­i­cine.

Biotech af­ter biotech has bit­ten the dust in pur­suit of can­cer vac­cines us­ing shared anti­gens, from Bavar­i­an Nordic and Aduro to Sel­l­as and Ar­gos, which flopped bad­ly de­spite de­ploy­ing a per­son­al­ized ap­proach.

Yet that hasn’t stopped de­vel­op­ers from try­ing.

Mod­er­na and BioN­Tech are the bet­ter known play­ers in the sec­ond wave of can­cer vac­cines, with enor­mous piles of cash for their mR­NA pro­grams. As of De­cem­ber 2017, the Can­cer Re­search In­sti­tute count­ed 344 hu­man stud­ies in progress for can­cer vac­cines.

Pa­tient seg­men­ta­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing and cost will like­ly re­main key hur­dles for suc­cess in this field. But this kind of ear­ly re­sults is ex­act­ly what keeps com­pa­nies hope­ful.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.