scholarly journals Helper T-Cell Responses and Clinical Activity of a Melanoma Vaccine With Multiple Peptides From MAGE and Melanocytic Differentiation Antigens

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (30) ◽  
pp. 4973-4980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig L. Slingluff ◽  
Gina R. Petroni ◽  
Walter Olson ◽  
Andrea Czarkowski ◽  
William W. Grosh ◽  
...  

PurposeA phase I/II trial was performed to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of a novel melanoma vaccine comprising six melanoma-associated peptides defined as antigenic targets for melanoma-reactive helper T cells. Source proteins for these peptides include MAGE proteins, MART-1/MelanA, gp100, and tyrosinase.Patients and MethodsThirty-nine patients with stage IIIB to IV melanoma were vaccinated with this six-peptide mixture weekly at three dose levels, with a preceding phase I dose escalation and subsequent random assignment among the dose levels. Helper T-lymphocyte responses were assessed by in vitro proliferation assay and delayed-type hypersensitivity skin testing. Patients with measurable disease were evaluated for objective clinical response by Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors.ResultsVaccination with the helper peptide vaccine was well tolerated. Proliferation assays revealed induction of T-cell responses to the melanoma helper peptides in 81% of patients. Among 17 patients with measurable disease, objective clinical responses were observed in two patients (12%), with response durations of 1 and 3.9+ years. Durable stable disease was observed in two additional patients for periods of 1.8 and 4.6+ years.ConclusionResults of this study support the safety and immunogenicity of a vaccine comprised of six melanoma helper peptides. There is also early evidence of clinical activity.

Blood ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 116 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter G. Maslak ◽  
Tao Dao ◽  
Lee M. Krug ◽  
Suzanne Chanel ◽  
Tatyana Korontsvit ◽  
...  

Abstract A pilot study was undertaken to assess the safety, activity, and immunogenicity of a polyvalent Wilms tumor gene 1 (WT1) peptide vaccine in patients with acute myeloid leukemia in complete remission but with molecular evidence of WT1 transcript. Patients received 6 vaccinations with 4 WT1 peptides (200 μg each) plus immune adjuvants over 12 weeks. Immune responses were evaluated by delayed-type hypersensitivity, CD4+ T-cell proliferation, CD3+ T-cell interferon-γ release, and WT1 peptide tetramer staining. Of the 9 evaluable patients, 7 completed 6 vaccinations and WT1-specific T-cell responses were noted in 7 of 8 patients. Three patients who were HLA-A0201-positive showed significant increase in interferon-γ–secreting cells and frequency of WT1 tetramer-positive CD8+ T cells. Three patients developed a delayed hypersensitivity reaction after vaccination. Definite related toxicities were minimal. With a mean follow-up of 30 plus or minus 8 months after diagnosis, median disease-free survival has not been reached. These preliminary data suggest that this polyvalent WT1 peptide vaccine can be administered safely to patients with a resulting immune response. Further studies are needed to establish the role of vaccination as viable postremission therapy for acute myeloid leukemia. This study was registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov as #NCT00398138.


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (21) ◽  
pp. 2924-2932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig L. Slingluff ◽  
Gina R. Petroni ◽  
Kimberly A. Chianese-Bullock ◽  
Mark E. Smolkin ◽  
Merrick I. Ross ◽  
...  

Purpose This multicenter randomized trial was designed to test whether melanoma-associated helper peptides augment CD8+ T-cell responses to a melanoma vaccine and whether cyclophosphamide (CY) pretreatment augments CD4+ or CD8+ T-cell responses to that vaccine. Patients and Methods In all, 167 eligible patients with resected stage IIB to IV melanoma were randomly assigned to four vaccination study arms. Patients were vaccinated with 12 class I major histocompatibility complex–restricted melanoma peptides (12MP) to stimulate CD8+ T cells and were randomly assigned to receive a tetanus helper peptide or a mixture of six melanoma-associated helper peptides (6MHP) to stimulate CD4+ T cells. Before vaccination, patients were also randomly assigned to receive CY pretreatment or not. T-cell responses were assessed by an ex vivo interferon gamma ELISpot assay. Clinical outcomes and toxicities were recorded. Results Vaccination with 12MP plus tetanus induced CD8+ T-cell responses in 78% of patients and CD4+ T-cell responses to tetanus peptide in 93% of patients. Vaccination with 12MP plus 6MHP induced CD8+ responses in 19% of patients and CD4+ responses to 6MHP in 48% of patients. CY had no significant effect on T-cell responses. Overall 3-year survival was 79% (95% CI, 71% to 86%), with no significant differences (at this point) by study arm. Conclusion Melanoma-associated helper peptides paradoxically decreased CD8+ T-cell responses to a melanoma vaccine (P < .001), and CY pretreatment had no immunologic or clinical effect. Prior work showed immunologic and clinical activity of 6MHP alone. Possible explanations for negative effects on CD8 responses include modulation of homing receptor expression or induction of antigen-specific regulatory T cells.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (Suppl 3) ◽  
pp. A579-A579
Author(s):  
Carmen Loquai ◽  
Jessica Hassel ◽  
Patrick Brück ◽  
Evelyna Derhovanessian ◽  
Katarina Cuk ◽  
...  

BackgroundLipo-MERIT is an ongoing, first-in-human, open-label, dose-escalation Phase I trial investigating safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of BNT111 in patients with advanced melanoma. BNT111 is an RNA-LPX vaccine targeting the melanoma tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) New York esophageal squamous cell carcinoma 1 (NY-ESO-1), tyrosinase, melanoma-associated antigen 3 (MAGE-A3), and transmembrane phosphatase with tensin homology (TPTE). A previous exploratory interim analysis showed that BNT111, alone or combined with immune checkpoint inhibition (CPI), has a favorable adverse event (AE) profile, gives rise to antigen-specific T-cell responses and induces durable objective responses in CPI-experienced patients with unresectable melanoma.1 Here, we present preliminary data in patients with no evidence of disease (NED) at trial inclusion in the BNT111 monotherapy subgroup.MethodsPatients with stage IIIB/C and IV pre-treated cutaneous melanoma were intravenously administered with BNT111 using a prime/repeat boost protocol. Patients were treated in seven dose escalation cohorts (7.2 to 400 µg total RNA) and three expansion cohorts to further explore dose levels of 14.4, 50 and 100 μg. In this analysis, patients receiving BNT111 monotherapy were grouped as having evidence of disease (ED) or NED, and immunogenicity, efficacy and safety were evaluated. Vaccine-induced immune responses were analyzed using an interferon-γ enzyme-linked immune absorbent spot (ELISpot) assay directly ex vivo.ResultsAs of May 24, 2021, 115 patients have received BNT111 within the Lipo MERIT trial. Of 71 patients treated with BNT111 monotherapy, 38 patients had ED and 33 patients had NED after prior therapies. Baseline characteristics were similar between the two groups. ELISpot data revealed comparable BNT111-induced T-cell responses against at least one TAA in ED vs. NED patients (14/22 [64%] and 19/28 [68%] patients with available ELISpot-evaluable samples, respectively), suggesting that BNT111 has the ability to induce T-cell immunity irrespective of the presence of a detectable tumor. As previously reported for ED patients, vaccine-induced CD4+ as well as CD8+ T-cell responses were also observed in NED patients, with a substantial fraction of de novo induced responses undetectable prior to vaccination. In NED patients, clinical efficacy was promising; median disease-free survival was 34.8 months (95% confidence interval: 7.0–not reached). The safety profile was similar in ED vs. NED patients; 38/38 (100%) and 32/33 (97%) patients experienced related treatment-emergent AEs, respectively, of which the majority were mild-to-moderate flu-like symptoms.ConclusionsImmunogenicity and safety profiles of BNT111 monotherapy were comparable in ED and NED patients. Promising signs of clinical activity were observed in NED patients.AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to acknowledge Camilla West (BioNTech SE) for medical writing support.Trial RegistrationClinicaltrials.gov: NCT02410733; EudraCT No. 2013-001646-33.ReferencesSahin U, Oehm P, Derhovanessian E, et al. An RNA vaccine drives immunity in checkpoint-inhibitor-treated melanoma. Nature 2020;585(7823):107–112.Ethics ApprovalEthics & Institutional Review Board approval was obtained prior to initiation of the trial (2018-13393_21-AMG federführend).


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. 2615-2615
Author(s):  
Aaron Miller ◽  
Zeynep Kosaloglu-Yalcin ◽  
Luise Westernberg ◽  
Leslie Montero ◽  
Milad Bahmanof ◽  
...  

2615 Background: Neoantigens (NeoAg) are key targets for personalized immunotherapy but efficient methods for their systematic identification and therapeutic targeting remain elusive. We developed a methodology to reliably identify and verify somatic alteration-derived neoantigens based on natural T cell responses against them which formed the basis of an individualized therapeutic vaccine strategy. Methods: This is a phase Ib study to assess the immunogenicity, safety and early clinical activity of personalized synthetic long peptides (PSLP) cancer vaccines in combination with pembrolizumab for patients with treatment refractory metastatic solid tumors or PSLP vaccine alone as an adjuvant treatment with patients with no evidence of disease (NED) that incorporates patient-specific NeoAg identified by an HLA-agnostic, functional T-cell assay (see table). Results: At the time of data cutoff, a total of 5 patients had been treated on ARM-A, 5 patients on ARM-C and 2 patients on ARM-D. AES possibly attributed to personalized vaccine (PSLP), or pembrolizumab, or both include: Grade 1: Arthralgia (1); Diarrhea (1); Fever (4); Fatigue (7); Generalized muscle weakness (1); Headache (2); Nausea (1); Confusion (1); Injection site reaction (5); Rash maculo-papular (3); Flu like symptoms (5); Myalgia (1); and Grade 2: Diarrhea (1); Fatigue (1); Hyperhidrosis (1); Hypothyroidism (1); Injection site reaction (1); Proteinuria (1); Renal and Urinary – other (1); and Grade 3: Colitis (1). For the 9 patients with at least 1 radiographic assessment at the time of analysis 6 had a best response of stable disease (SD) and 3 had progressive disease (PD). Immune monitoring of peripheral blood specimens consistently demonstrated that NeoAg-specific T cell responses were enhanced following administration of PSLP vaccine. On-treatment biopsies demonstrated immune-editing with the variant allele frequency of targeted mutations decreasing following administration of the PSLP vaccine. Conclusions: Taken together, these data meet the trial primary endpoint by demonstrating PSLP vaccines targeting NeoAg identified using the HLA-agnostic pipeline augment effector T cell function against these targets. Clinical trial information: NCT02287428. [Table: see text]


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ievgen O. Koliesnik ◽  
Hedwich F. Kuipers ◽  
Carlos O. Medina ◽  
Svenja Zihsler ◽  
Dan Liu ◽  
...  

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. e0229461
Author(s):  
Sivasankaran Munusamy Ponnan ◽  
Peter Hayes ◽  
Natalia Fernandez ◽  
Kannan Thiruvengadam ◽  
Sathyamurthi Pattabiram ◽  
...  

Blood ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 122 (21) ◽  
pp. 5431-5431
Author(s):  
Stickel S. Juliane ◽  
Claudia Berlin ◽  
Daniel J. Kowalewski ◽  
Heiko Schuster ◽  
Lothar Kanz ◽  
...  

Abstract Data regarding the graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effect after allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT) and donor lymphocyte infusion strongly suggest that T lymphocytes play a major role in the rejection of leukemic cells. Immunotherapy directed against leukemia- associated antigens might elicit specific immune responses that may serve to eliminate minimal residual disease after chemotherapy, or enhance the GVL effect after SCT. To achieve this goal there is need to identify appropriate leukemia associated HLA ligands, which are able to induce specific T cell responses. We here aimed to characterize the HLA class I ligandome in AML patients to provide novel tumor associated antigens (TAA) for peptide-based immunotherapy employing our recently implemented approach of direct isolation and identification of naturally presented HLA ligands by affinity chromatography and mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) in AML (Stickel et.al., abstract in Blood 2012). Absolute HLA surface expression on AML cells and autologous monocytes and granulocytes was quantified by flow cytometry. HLA class I ligands were isolated from AML cells as well as bone marrow and peripheral blood mononuclear cell (BMNCs/PBMCs) of healthy donors. LC-MS/MS peptide analysis provided qualitative and semi-quantitative information regarding the composition of the respective ligandomes. Comparative analysis of malignant and benign samples served to identify ligandome-derived TAA (LiTAA) and to select peptide vaccine candidates. The most abundantly detected peptide candidates were checked for immunogenicity by ELISpot and confirmed by intracellular interferon-g staining of CD8+ T-cells. Meanwhile 15 AML patients (8 FLT3-ITD mutant) and 35 healthy donors were analyzed. We observed overexpression of HLA class I and II on AML cells as compared to autologous monocytes and granulocytes, with the level of significance reached for HLA class II (p=0,04). A total of more than 12,000 AML derived HLA ligands representing >6,000 different source proteins were identified; of which 2,220 were exclusively represented in AML, but not in healthy PBMC/BMNC. Data mining for broadly represented LiTAA pinpointed 98 TAA as most promising targets. HLA ligands derived from these TAA were presented exclusively on more than 33% of all analyzed AML samples, amongst them already described TAA (e.g. JUP, FAF1) as well as several new leukemia-associated proteins (e.g. MTCH2, METTL7A). Subset analysis of the FLT3-ITD positive AML cohort revealed 21 LiTAA presented exclusively on more than 50% of FLT3-ITD positive AML cases. Additional screening for HLA ligands derived from described leukemia associated antigens revealed overrepresentation for e.g. FLT3, NUSAP, RHAMM and RGS5. Specific CD8+ T cell responses were detected against two A*03 epitope pools (pool 1: APLP2, DKGZ, FAF1, MTCH2; pool 2: KLF2, METTL7A, VCIP1, WIPI1) in AML patients. Notably, the chosen A*03 epitope pools did not elicit specific responses of CTL from healthy donors. Taken together, our HLA class I ligandome analysis in AML for the first time identified naturally presented HLA ligands from patients including a vast array of new leukemia associated antigens representing promising targets for a multipeptide-based immunotherapy approach in AML. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.


2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. e15053-e15053 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Flörcken ◽  
Joachim Kopp ◽  
Kamran Movassaghi ◽  
Antje van Lessen ◽  
Anna Takvorian ◽  
...  

e15053 Background: Despite novel kinase inhibitors, prognosis of metastatic RCC remains poor and new experimental approaches are warranted. Our aim was to evaluate a DC-based vaccine, which exploits alloreactivity as a means to amplify specific anti-tumor immune responses. Methods: Allogeneic, partially HLA-matched DC were generated in our GMP facility. DC were loaded with autologous tumor lysate. 8 patients with progressive mRCC were included, 7 patients were immunized repetitively with 107 DC s.c. over 20 weeks. Low-dose IL-2 (3 Mio U s.c. qd) was used concomitantly. Endpoints of the study were feasibility, safety, immunological and clinical responses. T cell responses against HLA-A2-restricted RCC-associated antigens were evaluated by proliferation assays, ELISpot and cytokine bead array (CBA). T cell repertoire was analysed by T cell receptor γ and –β PCR. Results: Vaccination was feasible and safe, no treatment-related grade 3/4 toxicity or clinically relevant autoimmunity was observed. No objective responses were observed, however, 2/7 patients showed stable disease, one a minimal clinical response. The mean TTP was 24.6 weeks (range 5 to 96). Delayed-type hypersensitivity was detected in 3/7 and HLA antibodies were induced in 3/7 patients. In 3/7 patients T cell responses against RCC-associated antigens such as TYMS, G250, vimentin, surviving and cyclin-D1 were induced by vaccination. These antigen-specific T cells showed a predominant TH1-cytokine profile. Interestingly, a clonally expanded T cell population could be detected by γ- and –β PCR in one patient with both a minimal clinical response and a T cell response. This clone is currently persisting for more than 80 months, its specificity is under investigation. Conclusions: Vaccination with allogeneic tumor-lysate-loaded DC was feasible, safe and was able to induce TH1-polarized immune responses against RCC-associated antigens. Tumor vaccination might be a promising approach in minimal residual disease, possibly in combination with antibodies against CTLA-4 or PD-1.


2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. 3091-3091
Author(s):  
Jhanelle Elaine Gray ◽  
Alberto Chiappori ◽  
Charles C. Williams ◽  
Mary Colleen Pinder ◽  
Eric B. Haura ◽  
...  

3091 Background: Our GM.CD40L vaccine (an allogeneic tumor cell-based vaccine generated from human bystander cell line) recruits and activates dendritic cells, which then migrate to regional lymph nodes, where T cell activation occurs, leading to systemic tumor cell killing. The CCL21 chemokine helps to recruit T cells and leads to enhanced T cell responses. The GM.CD40L.CCL21 combination has demonstrated additive effects in NSCLC mouse models. Methods: We initiated a phase I/II randomized study to evaluate GM.CD40L (Arm A) vs. GM.CD40L.CCL21 (Arm B) in patients with lung adenocarcinoma who had failed first-line therapy. Primary endpoints were safety and tolerability of Arm B in phase I and progression-free survival (PFS) in phase II; secondary endpoints included anti-tumor immune responses/T-cell responses by ELISpot assay on PBMC. Immune-related response criteria as determined by the investigator served to determine discontinuation from study treatment. Intradermal vaccines were administered every 14 days for 3 doses and then monthly X3. A two-stage minimax design was used. Results: In phase I, 3 patients received GM.CD40L.CCL21; no dose-limiting toxicities occurred. Between 4/2012 and 12/2012, Arm A enrolled 11 and Arm B enrolled 16 patients, including those in phase I (median age: 70/67.5 years, females: 45.5%/37.5%, PS1: 54.5%/75%, median prior regimens: 3/5 for Arm A vs. Arm B, respectively). Most common toxicities for Arm A vs. Arm B were injection site reaction (45.5%/43.8%), fatigue (9.1%/37.5%), anorexia (0%/12.5%), and pain in extremity (0%/12.5%). Median PFS for Arm A vs. B was 4.4 vs. 4.4 months (p=0.37). Of the 6 patients who remained on study post RECIST v1.1 progression, all demonstrated further progression on subsequent scans and were removed from the study. Of patients evaluable for efficacy, stable disease was 3/7 and progressive disease was 6/7 for Arm A vs. Arm B, respectively. Analyses of ELISpot assay on the PBMC are underway. Conclusions: GM.CD40L.CCL21 vaccine is well tolerated; thus far, median PFS results are similar to GM.CD40L vaccine. Updated results of the phase II trial will be presented. Clinical trial information: NCT01433172.


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