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    Vaccines

    Program: The Latest Myeloma News from ASH
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    Andrew Schorr:

    Hmm.  Let’s go on.  So people want to know about other things that are in development.  Just want to bring up vaccines.  So there is now a vaccine used to fight the cancer in men with very advanced prostate cancer.  That was I think the first vaccine of its kind approved.  I interviewed a lymphoma specialist who is trying to work on one in lymphoma, and there is research going on in myeloma.  Any comment on that, Dr. Orlowski?  Are you familiar with that?  Any comment on whether your own immune system could be managed that way with a vaccine to fight the myeloma? 

    Dr. Orlowski:

    Well, I think this is part of a more general issue which is how do we harness the immune system in patients to try to help fight off myeloma because most of the approaches that we’ve been using so far probably don’t use that, but we are making progress.  First, although this isn’t a vaccine, we have a number of antibodies that are now being used in the clinic in trials that target proteins on the surface of the myeloma cells, and some of these studies have been actually done by Dr. Lonial, so there is an antibody called elotuzumab, where the data look I think quite promising.  And there was another antibody presented at the meeting called lorvotuzumab, mertansine, which also seems quite attractive, and maybe some of your listeners will have hopefully access to the trials with those drugs. 

    I do think that vaccine approaches are important as well, and there are a number of trials being prepared with different types of vaccines.  One of the studies that the Dana-Farber people are going to be doing is using peptide vaccines against proteins that are important to the growth of myeloma cells in order to try to raise immunity and maybe prevent people who have early-stage asymptomatic myeloma from progressing to symptomatic myeloma.  And then we have a trial coming at M. D. Anderson which will using a personalized vaccine which will be developed against the M protein, or monoclonal protein, that myeloma cells make, and that will be added onto stem cell transplantation to try to boost the immune system after transplant to get rid of any leftover myeloma cells.  And I think if we combine chemotherapies and transplant and these vaccine approaches that will get us closer to a cure. 

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