Massachusetts General Hospital Develops Potential Vaccine for Mesothelioma and Ovarian Cancers

In the hopes of creating a potential vaccine for mesothelioma and ovarian cancer, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have engineered a protein which has shown prolonged survival in animal models with both types of cancer.

Researchers combined a protein programmed to target an antibody fragment that targets mesothelin, with a protein from tuberculosis bacteria that stimulates the activity of dendritic, or immune cells. The researchers activated the dendritic cells to target tumor cells while remaining inside the patient's body. Typically approaches to developing cancer vaccines using these types of immune cells require extracting cells from the patient’s body, treating them with the vaccination agent, and returning them into the body.

"Many patients with advanced cancers don't have enough functioning immune cells to be harvested to make a vaccine, but our protein can be made in unlimited amounts to work with the immune cells patients do have," explains study co-author Jeffrey Gelfand, MD, senior scientist at the MGH Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center. "We have created a potentially much less expensive approach to making a therapeutic cancer vaccine that, while targeting a single tumor antigen, generates an immune response against multiple antigens.”

The mesothelin-targeting protein binds to mesothelin cells, activates the dendritic cells, and enhances the cells' processing and presentation of several different tumor antigens, inducing a number of T-cell-based immune responses. Treatment with the protein significantly slowed tumor growth and extended survival in mouse models of both tumors.

Mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and pancreatic cancer all have the potential to be treated with a mesothelin targeting vaccine. "Immunotherapy is generally nontoxic, so this vaccine has the potential of safely extending survival and reducing the effects of these tumors, possibly even cutting the risk of recurrence.”

The MGH team just received a two-year grant from the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program to continue their research.  Source