Personal neoantigen vaccines induce persistent memory T cell responses and epitope spreading in patients with melanoma

Z Hu, DE Leet, RL Allesøe, G Oliveira, S Li… - Nature medicine, 2021 - nature.com
Z Hu, DE Leet, RL Allesøe, G Oliveira, S Li, AM Luoma, J Liu, J Forman, T Huang…
Nature medicine, 2021nature.com
Personal neoantigen vaccines have been envisioned as an effective approach to induce,
amplify and diversify antitumor T cell responses. To define the long-term effects of such a
vaccine, we evaluated the clinical outcome and circulating immune responses of eight
patients with surgically resected stage IIIB/C or IVM1a/b melanoma, at a median of almost 4
years after treatment with NeoVax, a long-peptide vaccine targeting up to 20 personal
neoantigens per patient (NCT01970358). All patients were alive and six were without …
Abstract
Personal neoantigen vaccines have been envisioned as an effective approach to induce, amplify and diversify antitumor T cell responses. To define the long-term effects of such a vaccine, we evaluated the clinical outcome and circulating immune responses of eight patients with surgically resected stage IIIB/C or IVM1a/b melanoma, at a median of almost 4 years after treatment with NeoVax, a long-peptide vaccine targeting up to 20 personal neoantigens per patient (NCT01970358). All patients were alive and six were without evidence of active disease. We observed long-term persistence of neoantigen-specific T cell responses following vaccination, with ex vivo detection of neoantigen-specific T cells exhibiting a memory phenotype. We also found diversification of neoantigen-specific T cell clones over time, with emergence of multiple T cell receptor clonotypes exhibiting distinct functional avidities. Furthermore, we detected evidence of tumor infiltration by neoantigen-specific T cell clones after vaccination and epitope spreading, suggesting on-target vaccine-induced tumor cell killing. Personal neoantigen peptide vaccines thus induce T cell responses that persist over years and broaden the spectrum of tumor-specific cytotoxicity in patients with melanoma.
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