Mount Sinai: Cancer Vaccine

Main article: Cancer treatment

2021: Successful completion of the first phase of testing

In mid-April 2021, it became known that the vaccine against any cancer based on tumor DNA successfully passed the first phase of trials. The personalized cancer vaccine, developed by Mount Sinai, caused no safety problems and demonstrated beneficial effects in patients with various cancers, including lung and bladder cancer, who have a high risk of relapse.

Study author, MD Thomas Marron noted that personalized cancer vaccines include tumor-specific targets that the immune system can learn to recognize and attack by preventing cancer recurrence. The vaccine also contains an adjuvant, which is a "synthetic stabilized double-stranded RNA capable of activating multiple receptors of innate immunity, making it an optimal adjuvant to induce an immune response against tumor neoantigens."

Vaccine against any tumor DNA-based cancer from Mount Sinai successfully passed phase one trials

To create a personalized anti-cancer vaccine, Dr. Marron and colleagues sequenced each patient's tumor DNA, germline DNA, and tumor RNA. They also identified the tumor-specific targets of the patient so that his immune system could recognize the vaccine targets. Mount Sinai's computational pipeline, called OpenVax, allows researchers to prioritize these immunogenic targets for later synthesis and inclusion in the vaccine.

After standard treatment, such as solid tumor surgery or brain multiple myeloma bone transplantation, patients received 10 doses of personalized vaccine over six months. After an average follow-up period of 880 days, four patients showed no recurrence, four began to receive another therapy, four died and one decided not to continue the study. The vaccine was well tolerated, about a third of patients developed minor reactions at the injection site.^[1]

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