Vaccine works on hard-to-treat leukemia
Patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) often receive donor transplants that effectively “reboot” their own immune defenses, which then attack and potentially cure the hard-to-treat disease. However, these patients have a high rate of relapse, and the transplanted immune cells may also harm normal tissues, causing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Now, scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that they observed a strong and selective immune response in some patients who received, shortly after the transplant, several doses of a “personalized” tumor vaccine composed of their own inactivated leukemia cells combined with an immune stimulant, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF). Thus the vaccine boosted the power of the transplanted immune system’s ability to attack the cancer — known as the graft-versus-leukemia (GvL) effect. “Our studies suggest that autologous tumor cell vaccination is an effective strategy to advance long-term leukemia control” following transplants from donors, said senior author...