Headline: Can HNSCC patients receive a personalized vaccine against their cancer?
The Study: In this small, randomized phase 1 trial, 33 patients with locally advanced HNSCC who were disease free after resection and adjuvant RT were randomized to receive adjuvant and maintenance doses of a “viral-based personalized cancer vaccine, encoding up to 30 tumor-specific DNA sequences bearing in-silico predicted class I and class II epitopes” or the same vaccine at the time of disease recurrence. There were no grade 3+ adverse events related to treatment, and the most common events were injection site reactions. Granted this was a very small trial, but with a median follow up just over 2 years, the rate of recurrence was 0% in the vaccination arm and 19% in the standard arm.
TBL: In this study, anti-cancer vaccination was relatively safe and well tolerated in patients with resected HNSCC, and patients in the vaccination arm had favorable disease control outcomes.
TAGMATTERHORN
Janjigian, N Engl J Med 2025
Gastrointestinal
| Janjigian, N Engl J Med 2025
The Study: In this small, randomized phase 1 trial, 33 patients with locally advanced HNSCC who were disease free after resection and adjuvant RT were randomized to receive adjuvant and maintenance doses of a “viral-based personalized cancer vaccine, encoding up to 30 tumor-specific DNA sequences bearing in-silico predicted class I and class II epitopes” or the same vaccine at the time of disease recurrence. There were no grade 3+ adverse events related to treatment, and the most common events were injection site reactions. Granted this was a very small trial, but with a median follow up just over 2 years, the rate of recurrence was 0% in the vaccination arm and 19% in the standard arm.
TBL: In this study, anti-cancer vaccination was relatively safe and well tolerated in patients with resected HNSCC, and patients in the vaccination arm had favorable disease control outcomes.
TAG
Janjigian, N Engl J Med 2025
Gastrointestinal
| Janjigian, N Engl J Med 2025