Nine patients with advanced kidney cancer who received an experimental vaccine tailored to their tumors’ specific mutations mounted an immune response to their disease and remained cancer-free for three years, an early-phase clinical trial has shown.
The study, published Wednesday in Nature, demonstrates the potential of personalized vaccines to change the course of certain cancer types, but larger, longer trials are needed to confirm this approach. Cancer vaccines developed with different molecular recipes are still in their early stages, before strong conclusions can be made, experts said.
“This neoantigen, individualized cancer vaccine is here to stay,” Toni Choueiri, co-author of the Nature paper and director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told STAT. “To go to the next level, which is a randomized study against standard of care — that’s what our study tells me.”
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