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Lymphoma Vaccines
Vaccine's for Non-Hodgkin's LymphomaThese are a very promising science, but one that is still in the clinical trial stages. Just like the name suggests, vaccines are an attempt to prevent relapses. Most of the vaccine trials are focusing on the indolent varieties of NHL at this time. Vaccine therapies have experienced several major setbacks with the failed results of the two biggest vaccine treatments. Both the Genitope and Favrille clinical trials failed in their primary endpoints in their trials, and both companies are now bankrupt and out of business.
The BiovaxID vaccine from Biovest has had a major breakthrough in 2010. Their Phase III results have shown that the vaccine that is directed against the IgM idiotype on tumour is very effective, whereas the vaccine directed against the IgG idiotype was not effective. What is amazing about this discovery is that the previous Favrille and Genitope vaccines were directed against IgG. This opens the door to highly specific vaccines that are known to work. Read their ASH 2010 abstract below.
Here is an update which reviews which patients will benefit from this vaccine and those who will not benefit. Identifying Patients With Follicular Lymphoma Who Are Likely to Benefit From an Idiotype Vaccine
There are still other vaccine treatments in clinical trials or in laboratory studies. Here is some information about some of them.
Idiotype: You will see the term "idiotype" used often in cancer vaccine research. Idiotype refers to the unique set of antigens that are expressed on the surface of each patients cancer cells. If you can isolate those specific antigens then you can use them to manufacture a vaccine against them, just like we can manufacture vaccines against specific viruses.
In Situ VaccinationIn this ongoing study, they first radiate a tumour site to kill the cancer. Then they inject an immune stimulant directly into the tumour. In Situ Vaccination With a TLR9 Agonist Induces Systemic Lymphoma Regression: A Phase I/II Study
Genetically modified T-cell vaccineBelow is a description of this line of research from one of the researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The quote is from 2004 but the research is more up to date.
We are conducting phase I trial for patients with relapsed follicular NHL using "killer" T-cells that have been genetically modified to recognize the CD20 marker on lymphoma cells. We extract a patient's T-cells from the blood, insert a gene into the T-cells in the laboratory so that they recognize CD20, grow the cells to large numbers in the lab, and then reinfuse these genetically modified cells back into the patient. We have treated 2 patients so far and hope that T-cell immune therapy against lymphoma will be better than the current antibody based therapies. We are conducting studies targeting other lymphoma markers and using T-cell immunotherapy for other types of lymphoma.
Here are some links about the above trial.
A Detailed look at adoptive T-cell therapies
Plant produced idiotype vaccines for fNHLIn this line of research they are using plants to produce the vaccines much faster than they can in the laboratory. Here is a link to a recent study on this topic. Dendritic cell vaccinesDendritic cells are cells that process antigen material and present it to other immune cells, thus initiating an immune response. Read more about dendritic cells at Wikipedia.
Vaccines prepared in one dayOne of the difficulties of the Favrille and Genitope vaccines was that they were time consuming and expensive to produce. Each vaccine took about six months to prepare. The following study attempts to address this issue. This vaccine can be made in a single day and it still uses a patient specific vaccine. Additional information about lymphoma vaccinesThe following two articles are from the the Journal Blood, and the journal Bloodline. Both are authoritative resources for anything haematology related.
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