Melanoma vaccine development failure (Figure)

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a British drug giant, recently announced the failure of an immunotherapy that is undergoing a third phase of trials But the company still hopes for it, because it will help some patients with specific genetic characteristics, so the trial is still in progress The London based company admitted in a press release that the volunteers in the study had melanoma and that the treatment "did not significantly extend patient survival" compared to the control group The vaccine, called MAGE-A3, has the same target protein, which can be expressed in tumor cells of a small number of patients It's supposed to stimulate the immune system to destroy those cells Steven Rosenberg, an immunologic clinical physician at the National Cancer Institute, said that the possible problem of MAGE-A3 was also a problem that countless other cancer vaccines could not overcome: it could not prevent the immune response, which just prevented the vaccine from successfully killing cancer cells "I think the chance that a mage vaccine will work is very slim, because vaccines like it won't work." Rosenberg said GSK scientists and their colleagues are trying to accurately predict who might respond to immunotherapies such as MAGE-A3 and other conventional cancer therapies In July, the company's researchers and University collaborators published a paper in the Journal of clinical oncology that they identified an 84 gene "signal," which appears to be related to the extent to which patients with metastatic melanoma can respond to the treatment Now, Melinda stubbee, a spokesman for GSK, says the company will test some of the changes in this signal in a melanoma trial involving 1345 participants A data security monitoring committee allowed the tests to continue until they were completed GSK is also carrying out a phase III trial of lung cancer therapy, which is expected to report results next year Recently, Andrew witty, CEO of the company, described MAGE-A3 as "high-risk, but potentially high return." "I'm not naive, I'm fully prepared to accept the failure of the project," he said