Prostate Cancer Lab #50: Cancer Vaccines (Lisa Butterfield) [Video]

Advanced cancer patients see immunotherapies as offering one of the best paths to a durable response. Cancer vaccines have a lot of potential because they offer a possible treatment option to nearly every cancer patient. And immunotherapies offer the promise of durable responses — they are fighting a biological system (the cancer) with another system (the immune system), rather than the hit and miss, less durable paradigm of targeting a biomarker with a single drug.

00:00:00 Meeting Introduction
00:02:00 Can Cancer Vaccines Really Work?
00:02:21 Disclosures
00:02:39 Cancer Vaccines Are Showing Promise. Here’s How They Work
00:02:52 mRNA Vaccine Combinations
00:03:39 Common Cancer Drivers
00:03:54 The Classics: Commonly Targeted Shared Tumor Antigens
00:04:11 Tumor Antigens
00:04:33 Tumor Cells are Poor APC
00:05:11 Timeline of Cancer Vaccine Development
00:05:21 FDA Approved (mCRPC)
00:05:56 Tumor Antigens
00:06:21 Three Phases of the Cancer Immuno-editing
00:07:01 T Cell Exhaustion
00:08:09 Vaccine Platforms
00:08:14 Dendritic Cells
00:08:46 Dendritic Cell Vaccines
00:08:54 Why Dendritic Cell Vaccines?
00:09:24 Antigen Delivery to Dendritic Cells and Patient Response
00:10:07 Epitope Spreading
00:11:17 What Have Vaccines Been Shown to Do?
00:11:40 Tumor Mutations
00:12:35 Neoantigens
00:13:15 Tesla Project (neoepitope pipelines)
00:14:08 Autologous Tumor Lysate-Loaded Dendritic Cell (Brain Tumors)
00:14:47 RNA Vaccines
00:15:17 Neoantigen T Cells
00:15:53 Porter Prostate Cancer Trial
00:18:14 Summary of Porter Findings
00:19:49 Summary of Companies Involved in Cancer Vaccine Trials
00:20:29 The Dawn of Vaccines for Cancer Prevention
00:21:12 Q&A

Lisa Butterfield, PhD, Consultant in Immuno-Oncology, Adjunct Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California San Francisco, is uniquely positioned to share the state of the art on cancer vaccines. Besides being a leading researcher, she brings the patient and caregiver perspective. Her husband had pancreatic cancer, and she was his patient advocate and caregiver. She experienced the extremely difficult challenges of trying to navigate this for him.

“In cancer vaccines people have been looking for targets – things that are different between the patient and the tumor. And there are a lot of targets. For a long time, these targets were sort of old timey things like PSMA and PSA, which are known to be overexpressed by a [prostate cancer] tumor, that we would try to target the immune system against. And the response has been okay, but not great.” – Lisa Butterfield