A Phase I clinical trial of an implantable vaccine to treat melanoma began last week, scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have announced.
The treatment uses a small disk-like sponge, roughly the size of a fingernail and made from FDA approved polymers, that is implanted under the skin.
It is designed to recruit and reprogram a patient’s own immune cells ‘on site’, instructing them to travel through the body, home in on cancer cells and then kill them.
This is different from most therapeutic cancer vaccines currently available that require doctors to first remove the patient’s immune cells from the body, then reprogramme them and reintroduce them back into the body.
The study, which is now recruiting, is to test safety in humans and is expected to conclude in 2015.
Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer. More than 10,600 people in the UK are diagnosed with melanoma each year and the cancer is most common in people aged 15-34. In the US, there have been 9,480 death caused by melanoma in 2013 alone.
"It is rare to get a new technology tested in the laboratory and moved into human clinical trials so quickly," said who is Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Cancer Vaccine Center co-leader Glenn Dranoff.
"We’re beyond thrilled with the momentum, and excited about its potential," said Dranoff, who is also professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
In the preclinical study reported in Science Translational Medicine, 50% of mice treated with two doses of the vaccine, which would have otherwise died from melanoma within around 25 days, showed complete tumour regression.
The technology may also be able to be applied to other cancers as well as melanoma.
Wyss Core Faculty member and leader of the study David J Mooney said: "Our vaccine was made possible by combining a wide range of biomedical expertise that thrives in Boston and Cambridge.
"It reflects the bioinspired engineering savvy and technology development focus of engineers and scientists at the Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS, as well as the immunological and clinical expertise of the researchers and clinicians at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School."
Image: Wyss Institute scientists Core Faculty member David Mooney (left) and senior staff scientist Ed Doherty (right). Photo: courtesy of Wyss Institute.
