Autologous Anticancer Antigen Preparation for Specific Immunotherapy in Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma

Role of vaccine therapy for renal cell carcinoma in the era of targeted therapy

“…Of the 33 patients with metastatic disease, eight patients had objective responses with a median survival of 32 months compared with the overall survival of 17 months. Although the results were not statistically significant, a favorable trend was observed and toxicity was minimal …”

“…For this reason, traditional adjuvants, such as incomplete Freund's adjuvant, IL‐2, IL‐12, GM‐CSF and BCG, have been used . Several studies reported various results, in which toxicities were relatively mild …”

Sequential treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma with autologous tumor vaccine and subcutaneous administration of recombinant interleukin-2 and interferon ?2b

“…Several specific forms of immunotherapy have already been tried in the treatment of renal cancer [14,20,28,30], the rationale being to incorporate in the vaccine an adjuvant with a specific component, i. e., tumour cells expressing a turnout-associated antigen; this is intended to activate any tumour-specific, T-cell-mediated, immune system in the host [29]. Our clinical protocol arose from investigations with NDV-modified autologous turnout cells within the ESb tumour model system [9] and clinical experience with ASI for human colorectal cancer [11,12], malignant melanoma [4], and lung cancer [10].…”

“…Of the 23 evaluable RCC patients, 3 exhibited a complete response and 4 displayed partial remission, 7 showed stable disease during 1-18 months (median = 5 months) of therapy, and progression was seen in 9. We conclude that vaccination with autologous tumour material combined with s.c. rIL-2 and rIFN-ctzb administration can induce regressions in patients with advanced RCC and that even in non-responding patients a more favourable course of the disease can be achieved.It has generally been doubted that active specific immunotherapy (ASI) can be successful in inducing regressions in human metastatic disease [5); indeed, many attempts using tumour-cell-derived preparations extensively tested on tumour-bearing patients during the 1970s and early 1980s were ineffectual [6] and have largely been abandoned.* To whom correspondence should be addressed However, several investigators assert that ASI can be an effective modality in the case of minimal residual turnout cell burdens [8,29], and accumulating clinical evidence suggests that appropriate immunization procedures can generate clinically meaningful ASI, especially against renal cell carcinoma [14,16,28,30]. The adjuvants with unspecific stimulatory activity utilized in these clinical studies included the bacillus CalmetteGu6rin [7, 30], Corynebacterium parvum [16,27,28], and the Newcastle disease virus [24].…”

“…* To whom correspondence should be addressed However, several investigators assert that ASI can be an effective modality in the case of minimal residual turnout cell burdens [8,29], and accumulating clinical evidence suggests that appropriate immunization procedures can generate clinically meaningful ASI, especially against renal cell carcinoma [14,16,28,30]. The adjuvants with unspecific stimulatory activity utilized in these clinical studies included the bacillus CalmetteGu6rin [7,30], Corynebacterium parvum [16,27,28], and the Newcastle disease virus [24].…”