Improving Personalized Cancer Vaccines
Thank you for supporting the Personalized Immunotherapy Research Lab (PIRL) and the future of personalized cancer immunotherapy. PIRL is a collaborative multi-investigator research group in the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina. Your donation will be utilized to accelerate and optimize research that will help improve current and future clinical trials of therapeutic cancer vaccines which target specific mutations from each patient's cancer.
The research project we are currently raising funds for is detailed here: Accelerating the Optimization of Personalized Cancer Vaccines (Google Doc). In brief, we are testing whether two different factors can improve the therapeutic benefit from personalized cancer vaccines:
We are seeking funding to test two kinds of improvements to personalized cancer vaccines:
(1) selection of better mutational targets by using “long read” sequencing technologies to identify large mutations which differ significantly from the genomes of healthy cells
(2) increasing immunogenicity of the vaccine formulation by comparing the current standard vaccine type (synthetic peptides with poly-ICLC as an adjuvant) with two experimental alternatives: (a) peptides combined with a proprietary STING agonist adjuvant, for which we have data showing superior immune responses, (b) encoding mutations in mRNA encapsulated with lipid nanoparticles.
This research may help us improve our upcoming clinical trial, PANDA-VAC (NCT04266730), as well as start future trials with improved methods. We thank you for your support!
Questions & Answers
Q: Why seek funds from philanthropy instead of traditional funding?
A: There are a few reasons we would prefer to raise funding for these experiments from private donations. One is that we are trying to integrate some of the results into a protocol for a trial which we are eager to open and traditional academic funding cycles are slow. Another is that funding this kind of work, very practical optimization of an experimental therapy, often falls awkwardly in between the two kinds of funding available to us: academic grants (which, in addition to being slow, tend to skew or broaden experimental scope) or VC funding (which wants a commitment to commercialization and control of the end product). We hope that by working in a very public-facing manner (e.g. monthly updates on research progress, open source code, open scientific data) we can create a new third option for funding rapid pre-clinical optimization.
Q: The planned study is being done on ovarian and bladder cancer models, will it need to be repeated with other types of cancers?
A: Potentially, no. The technique we are researching may apply to many forms of cancer since both the process used for detecting cancer mutations and the immunogenicity of a vaccine formulation are the same regardless of cancer type. That said, to show efficacy in people we will need to run multiple clinical trials.
Q: The budget for this project seems like a small amount of money for such groundbreaking research. Is this going to be enough to complete the research?
A: The funding we are seeking is to perform a specific research study to test new vaccine candidates in order to update our upcoming Phase I trial. We are able to keep the costs low for several reasons. First, we are able to use existing lab personnel, so there is no need to hire and train new staff, and second, the Primary Researchers are not seeking any salary support through this funding for planning, supervision, analysis or reporting. The lab is already established, so yes, the funding will be sufficient to complete this research study.