A new trial at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital will see cancer patients’ own tumours used as a starting point for a personalised vaccine.
The human trial comes after research was undertaken with dogs at the Kolling Institute of Medical Research, which is based at Royal North Shore Hospital.
The trial used personalised cancer vaccines to treat dogs that had been diagnosed with advanced cancers.
The results showed nearly all of the dogs treated exceeded their expected survival time and many owners reported their animals had an improved quality of life.
The trial of the human cancer vaccine, known as RGSH4K, is the next step in the research and will involve 21 adult patients.
To be included in the trial, patients must have had their tumour removed and stored in a process known as tumour banking, before they start treatment.
If the patient relapsed and there were no other treatment options available, a personalised vaccine would be produced from their tumour and injected into the patient at staged intervals.
The vaccine is produced from a patient’s own cancer cells and is combined with a proprietary immunostimulant to activate the immune system.
It is hoped the immune system’s memory will recognise and respond to existing and new tumours.
The trial will be conducted under the supervision of Royal North Shore Hospital oncologists Professor Stephen Clarke and Associate Professor Nick Pavlakis.
Professor Clarke said the trial will involve a broad range of tumours and patients who have no other treatment options available.
“But the biggest issue will be whether we can access the patient’s tumour,” he said.
“You can’t cut someone up just to get a bit of tumour so it will be people who have had bits of tumour that exist that we’ve frozen beforehand on the probability that their cancer will come back in the future.”
He said the aim of the trial was for the cancer to be stabilised and for the tumour to shrink, which would ideally lead to an extended life expectancy for patients.
“We’re basically trying to get the immune system to work more effectively against the patient’s tumour,” Professor Clarke said.
“So you get a bit of the tumour, you stimulate the immune system and you vaccinate the patient against their own tumour in the hope it will be dealt with more effectively.”
He said if it was successful they would do bigger trials.
“Manipulation of the immune system to allow the body to better fight the cancer has become a popular treatment target and because of that reality, using the patient’s primary tumour as the source for a vaccine offers the hope of an improved immune response to tumour-associated proteins called antigens,” Professor Clarke said.
“If we show efficacy in this study then we’ll take it into a bigger study and then compare the vaccine with standard treatments to see if it’s better.”
People interested in participating in the trial should consult their oncologist about their suitability.