Follicular dendritic cellWIKIMEDIA, ASZAKAL Most tumors express mutant proteins not made by healthy cells, and the range of these mutated proteins varies from patient to patient. Exploiting these individual variations, a team led by researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has created personalized dendritic cell vaccines using these mutated peptides, called neoantigens, which can activate a diverse range of melanoma patients’ cytotoxic T-cells in vivo.
A study assessing the immunologic effects of the vaccines—not their therapeutic benefit—is published today (April 2) in Science.
The work is an early proof of principle that immunization against these neoantigens results in patient immune responses, Nina Bhardwaj, director of immunotherapy at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City who was not involved in the work, wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist.
“Scientifically and immunologically, this was a tour de force as the first example of a personalized vaccine strategy,” said Jeffrey Weber, a tumor immunologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, who also was not involved in the study.
In a 2013 study, coauthor Beatriz Carreno, a human immunologist in the oncology division at the Washington ...
