A team of researchers from City of Hope and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has reported safety and efficacy results from a Phase 1 trial that featured a personalized vaccine to treat lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma, a rare and slow-growing type of blood cancer, according to a study published recently in Nature Communications .
The current approach to lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma care is active surveillance of a patient's possible symptoms. There is a median time of 3.5 years from diagnosis to progression of symptoms—such as fever, night sweats, weight loss and fatigue—that require chemotherapy.
"By doing an early intervention with the vaccine , we nearly doubled the disease-free progression time to an average of just under seven years," said Larry Kwak, M.D., Ph.
D., director of City of Hope's Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center within the Hematologic Malignancies Research Institute, who developed the vaccine and is the study's corresponding author. "In addition to being effective, the vaccine appears to be safe.
It didn't have any of the harsh side effects associated with other types of common cancer treatments." Toxicity among trial participants was also limited, Dr. Kwak said.
That's because the vaccine uses patient-specific biologic components called tumor neoantigens that can help the body mount an immune response to a particular tumor type. The clinical trial, led by M.D.
Anderson, enrolled nine patients, who were able to tolerate the therapy without negati.