Therapeutic Vaccine for Leukemia Has Been Developed

A new type of precise therapeutic vaccine against leukemia has been developed by a team of researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhujiang Hospital of Southern Medical University. 

The collaborative team utilized the self-healing feature of the microcapsule to load these epitope peptides and PD-1 antibodies into the polylactic acid microcapsules.

Their study was published in the Nature Biomedical Engineering.

According to the lead researcher Li Yuhua, findings revealed the high expression of EPS8 and PD-1/PD-L1 in leukemia patients. This could be used as a new type of leukemia antigen and a checkpoint target for a leukemia vaccine.

The researchers observed that after a single vaccination, the deposition and degradation of microcapsules at the site of injection lead to the recruitment of activated antigen-presenting cells and sustained release of both cargos.

Prof. Wei Wei from IPE said that with the synergism of these two aspects, there has been a significant improvement in specific Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte (CTL) activation.

Although it has been established that there is a possibility of treating leukemia through vaccination, therapeutic performance still falls short of clinic expectations. 

The team also verified that through various epitope peptides in different models, such as murine leukemia, humanized cell line-derived leukemia xenograft (CDX), and patient-derived leukemia xenograft (PDX) models, the novel vaccine could be made available.

This type of microcapsule-based formulation shows better performance as compared to the commercialized adjuvant in all leukemia therapeutic models. This is a very promising result for using a microcapsule-based vaccine against various leukemia antigens in the clinic.

Researcher Ma Guanghui is confident that through advantages of FDA-approved polylactic acid material, convenience in the preparation of vaccine formulation, diversity of vaccine components, and excellent therapeutic effect, this microcapsule-based vaccine demonstrates great potential for clinical translation.

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Vaccine therapy against leukemia

Vaccine therapy for cancer treatment does not work in the same way as conventional vaccines preventing measles or polio. 

This cancer vaccine is a therapeutic vaccine, a type of immunotherapy which targets already-present cancer and reduces its growth potential. 

Prior to giving the vaccine itself, most cancer vaccine studies involve administering chemotherapy, radiation, or other standard cancer therapy to initially reduce the amount of disease in the body.

Most cancer vaccines being developed intend to trigger an immune response to an antigen by stimulating T cells to search and destroy tumor cells. Most cancer cells have cancer-specific antigens on their surface that healthy cells do not have. When a vaccine is administered, the immune system can recognize and destroy the cancer cells that have these molecules on their surface.

Most cancer vaccines also contain adjuvants, substances that may help strengthen the immune response.

Ideally, the vaccines aim to also destroy any remaining cells after other types of cancer treatment to stop cancer from recurring. 

Continuous research is being done to find a vaccine that can prevent cancer from recurring, but for now, there are no licensed blood cancer vaccines yet. All are in development and available only in clinical trials.

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