Thomas Marron, MD, PhD, on the Value of Neoantigen Vaccines and Future Research

Thomas Marron, MD, PhD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, spoke with CancerNetwork® at the virtual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2021 about the value that neoantigen vaccines can provide to patients with cancer, even if the process is expensive and time consuming.

Transcription:

I’ll be honest, these neoantigen vaccines are very time consuming and expensive, but I think that they teach us a lot not only by validating these pipelines, but also by studying the T-cell responses and the characteristics of the lymphoid response to these antigens. It’s going to inform our next generation of vaccines, whether that be personalized vaccines. Obviously, personalized vaccines are ideal because we can vaccinate and develop a polyclonal response to a patient’s tumor. But even if we’re looking at off-the-shelf shared neoantigen vaccines, there [are] a lot of companies working on EGFR vaccines, KRAS vaccines, p53 vaccines, and maybe a combination thereof, those all being driver mutations that are seen across many different malignancies. Using the pipeline that we use, and also studying the samples from these patients is really going to help push those fields forward as well.

Reference:

Marron TU, Saxena M, Bhardwaj N, et al. An adjuvant personalized neoantigen peptide vaccine for the treatment of malignancies (PGV-001). Presented at: AACR Annual Meeting 2021; April 10-15, 2021; virtual. Abstract LB048.