Preclinical Development of TVAX: An Advanced Multiantigen Vaccine for Therapy and Prevention of Malignant Mesothelioma
Abstract
In the 1st year, we developed immunotherapies using viral vector-based vaccines, as well as peptide-based vaccines. For the first prototypes of these vaccines, Tvax and Tvax 2.0, we have included antigens demonstrated to be highly expressed inhuman tumors. Unexpectedly, these vaccines resulted ineffective in reducing MM in mice and displayed signs of autoimmunity. We hypothesized that these negative results were caused by a reduced expression in mouse MM of the antigens included in Tvax vaccines. A whole transcriptome analysis to compare protein expression between MM and normal tissues confirmed our assumption. This analysis also allowed us to choose a new set of antigens that presented more effective anti-cancer responses in our experiments, without generating auto-immunity. During the 2nd year of this project, we focused on evaluating the anti-cancer efficacy of Tvax 3.0 vaccines, which include this new set of antigens. We also characterized the antigen specific immune responses generated by Tvax 3.0 and analyzed immune cell infiltrates in tumors from vaccinated mice. All these data were incorporated in a manuscript that was submitted for publication at the beginning of the 3rd year of this project. During the 3rd year, we performed all the experiments requested by the reviewers and successfully published an article in Frontiers in Oncology. During the 3rd and 4th year, we started the development of hTvax for human immunization.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2020
- Accession Number
- AD1158145
Entities
People
- Pietro Bertino
Organizations
- University of Hawaiʻi System