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Vaccine boosts T cells that target pancreatic tumours

Efforts to tackle pancreatic cancer by harnessing immune cells have had limited success. A clinical trial reports promising results from testing a personalized approach to boosting immune responses to such tumours.
  1. Amanda L. Huff

    1. Amanda L. Huff is at the Johns Hopkins Convergence Institute, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Kimmel Institute for Immunotherapy and the Skip Viragh Center for Pancreatic Cancer, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21287, USA, and also in the Department of Oncology, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University.

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  2. Neeha Zaidi

    1. Neeha Zaidi is at the Johns Hopkins Convergence Institute, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Kimmel Institute for Immunotherapy and the Skip Viragh Center for Pancreatic Cancer, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21287, USA, and also in the Department of Oncology, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University.

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The development of a type of immunotherapy that uses drugs known as immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) has revolutionized cancer treatment. ICIs act by helping to unleash a person’s immune system against mutated versions of proteins (termed neoantigens) that are expressed solely by cancer cells. Peptide segments of neoantigens are likely to be viewed as foreign by the immune system, and can activate immune cells called T cells (specifically, those known as CD8 T cells), which are capable of killing cancer cells. Pancreatic cancers generally don’t respond to ICIs. This is thought to be partly because these tumours express lower levels of neoantigens than do other types of tumour, and thus are less likely to activate a strong immune response from antitumour T cells.

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Nature 618, 37-38 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01526-8

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Competing Interests

A.L.H. is co-founder and a paid consultant for Adventris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. N.Z. receives research support from Bristol Myers Squibb, has served on an advisory board for Genentech, and receives other support from Adventris Pharmaceuticals.

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