IMPLICATIONS FOR AN IMMUNOTHERAPY APPROACH IN THE MANAGEMENT OF OVARIAN CANCER AND OTHER SOLID TUMORS
Many ovarian cancers are spontaneously invaded by T-cells. Patients whose tumors have tumor-infiltrating T cells survive longer. Therefore, the Penn investigators believe that immunotherapy has a chance to make a difference in patients with ovarian cancer and there are clinical examples supporting this notion. The type of vaccine that the Ovarian Cancer Research Center has launched with ITI-OC’s support has never been tested before in ovarian cancer, but is expected to represent one of the most powerful approaches to tumor vaccines to date.
No cancer therapy comes with a guarantee, but this autologous immunotherapy vaccine-based protocol being funded through ITI-OC holds a lot of potential and is also a platform technology that has the potential to be applied to multiple cancers.
The personalized vaccine combines a patient’s own dendritic cells (DC) with cancer related proteins, or antigens, with the aim of inducing immune responses against a patient’s cancer cells. There have been early -stage clinical trial data demonstrating how a personalized vaccine can have the ability to significantly delay disease progression, in addition to possibly prolonging patient survival, while maintaining a good quality of life.