A Phase II Study of HyperAcute-Lung Cancer Vaccine in Subjects With Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Who Responded to First Line Platinum-Doublet Treatment
Unfortunately, despite the best clinical efforts and breakthroughs in biotechnology, most
patients diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer continue to die from their disease.
Reasons for this include that: 1) patients are often diagnosed at a time when their lung
cancer has already spread to other sites such as the chest cavity, bone, lung, liver, and
brain limiting the options for local radiation therapy and surgery, and 2) the cancer cells
are resistant or become resistant to chemotherapy drugs used to treat the patient.
Resistance to one type of chemotherapy agent often rapidly leads to resistance against many
other chemotherapy drugs.
These reasons are the major causes of cancer progression that are usually discussed when
considering treatment options for patients with disease that continues to grow and spread.
However, another important part of the body should be considered-- the immune system.
Scientists have clearly shown that lung cancer cells produce a number of abnormal proteins
or abnormal amounts of certain proteins found in normal lung cells. Normally one would
expect a patient to develop an immune response against these abnormal proteins found in
their cancer and attack them much the way we would fight off an infection from a foreign
bacteria or virus. However, for reasons that scientists do not fully understand, the immune
system fails to respond to these abnormal proteins and does not attack the lung cancer
cells. This human clinical trial proposes a new way to make the immune system recognize the
cancer and encourage it to attack the cancer cells.
Many people are familiar with the idea of transplants between people of organs like the
kidneys or heart. When an organ transplant between two people is completed one of the
problems that can occur is rejection of the donated organ by the recipient. This can occur
because the immune system of the patient who receives the organ attacks the donated organ.
If you were to attempt to transplant a pig heart to a human the rejection would be
dramatically stronger than when organs are transplanted between two people. This is partly
because lower animals express sugar-protein patterns on the surface of their cells that
humans do not. In fact, our immune systems can quickly recognize tissues from lower mammals
such as the pig or the mouse and destroys them.
In this project, we have put a mouse gene into human lung cancer cells that produces these
abnormal sugar patterns and stimulates the immune system to attack the lung cancer. This
strategy works well to kill human other cancer cells in the laboratory, but it needs to be
tried in lung cancer patients to see if it will be effective and to determine if such a
treatment causes any side effects. We propose to test this new treatment in subjects with
non-small cell lung cancer to see if it can stop, slow or destroy tumors in these subjects.
Subjects will be injected with an anti-tumor vaccine consisting of a mixture of three types
of dead human lung cancer cells that have been genetically altered to express the mouse gene
responsible for making this abnormal sugar-protein on the cells.
Interventional
Allocation: Non-Randomized, Endpoint Classification: Safety/Efficacy Study, Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment, Masking: Open Label, Primary Purpose: Treatment
To determine the response rate of the administration of HyperAcute® Lung (HAL) Cancer Vaccine cells by injection into subjects with stage IIIB (pleural effusion) or stage IV non-small cell lung carcinoma who have been treated with first line platinum-dou
4 months
No
Charles J. Link, Jr., M.D.
Study Chair
NewLink Genetics Corporation
United States: Food and Drug Administration
NLG0201
NCT00420732
January 2007
December 2013
Name | Location |
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Northwestern University | Chicago, Illinois 60611 |
Washington University in St. Louis | St. Louis, Missouri 63110 |