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What is the current status of developing a melanoma vaccine?
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VernonSondakMD (Physician - Surgery - Surgical Oncology (Verified) ) - 06 / 07 / 2012
Melanoma vaccines have been under evaluation for many years, and unfortunately none has as yet proven to be effective. Several vaccines are in late phases of testing, including the MAGE-A3 vaccine (which is also being tested in lung cancer) and several others that are just getting started in randomized phase III clinical trials. Furthermore, we have seen dramatic improvements in our understanding of the immune system that have led to developing new drugs to stimulate an antitumor immune response, like the anti-CTLA4 antibody ipilimumab (Yervoy). The availability of these new drugs has led to some rethinking of whether combining them with vaccines might lead to better results. Another very promising approach – although currently restricted to just a few major melanoma centers worldwide – is using patients’ own tumors to produce activated immune cells called Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes or TIL. Patients who have been able to go through the TIL process (only a very small percentage of stage IV melanoma patients even qualify, and not all of them are able to get the TIL produced in the laboratory and administered back to them in the hospital) have had a high rate of response, and some very long-term responses have been seen. Time will tell if the technology to produce these TIL can be streamlined to the point where the therapy is accessible to more patients, or alternatively if newer approaches will eliminate the need to create TIL in the laboratory and instead generate and activate them in the patient’s body.
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