What are cancer vaccines and how do they work? What side effects are within myeloma vaccines?

[Music] foreign [Music] what is a vaccine so I think people are familiar with the notion of a vaccine to protect against infection we get those as kids to prevent technique at things like measles or mumps and now there's been of course a experience with the coveted pandemic and how what a critical Place uh vaccines have played in that and the notion there is is that you're trying to train the immune system to see an infection as something that is foreign and something you need to be protected against so we essentially educate the immune system to be prepared that if that pathogen if that infection arises we have cells that are there for the ready to protect and get rid of that infection and also to provide memory so that if infection is re-experienced you're ready for it so we're essentially trying to do the same thing in cancer which is to essentially train the immune system to see cancer cells as foreign to raise a population of immune cells often known as T cells to be having already been prepared to see that particular feature of a cancer as something to go after or something foreign and then to attack it and also protect against its re-emergence are vaccines a type of immunotherapy it's a type of immunotherapy exactly exactly how do cancer vaccines work so I think people have become more and more familiar with how the immune system can attack cancer so for instance things like car T cells or T Cell engages we call bites are about raising a population of immune cells that you directly Infuse into the patient in a vaccine what we're trying to do is educate the immune system inside the patient by introducing parts of the tumor for instance an antigen or a protein that's on that tumor or taking the whole tumor cell itself and introducing it to the immune system in the patient in a way that the patient can now see it cancer cells are often present in a way that's very difficult for the immune system to see essentially hide and they create a bubble around themselves that make them very difficult to detect what a vaccine is trying to do is take pieces of the tumor or the whole tumor itself reintroduce into the immune system often with things that will stimulate the immune system stimulate teachers of the immune system known as dendritic cells and to drive an immune response inside the patient's own body and that those T cells that are then stimulated can fight against the malignancy but also then be an army that's there at the ready at time of potential relapse so vaccines in general are a means of eliciting an immune response and the way that you do that whether it's for tetanus or measles or for cancer is to take some bits and pieces of whatever it is that you're trying to kill or trying to get control of and that can be the whole cell that's inactivated as you as we know now with covid that can be what they call mRNA and the MRNA then in the vaccine gets inside different immune cells and has those cells produce the abnormal proteins that are part of covid and that allows the immune system to recognize these proteins and say okay I'm going to bond an immune response to this with the myeloma vaccine which I'm involved with some years ago Ivan Brello and colleagues took bits and pieces of myeloma cell lines so these were bits and pieces of myeloma cell lines that had been taken from patients who had aggressive myelomas from many years ago and these were studied and in different settings and what they did was when they took these cell lines they mixed them with another cell that reduces a produces a substance called gmcsf and now what all these things mean is that you take bits and pieces of myeloma and another cell you mix them all together and this other cell makes this gmcsf and gmcsf is kind of like a Kickstarter it's what we call an immunode when you put all this stuff together put it in a shot and give it to a patient then the gmcsf which is being produced by the cell along with bits and pieces of myeloma Tails immune system cells in the vicinity hey come over here this is myeloma it's right here it's you've just been injected with dead myeloma cells and the immune system under the influence of gmcsf and in a environment where it finds dead myeloma cells looks at these and goes you know what this looks bad to me this is something that we need to learn how to fight so these are antigens and the immune system is exposed to them and the immune system says hey look let me mount an immune response let me Mount develop train T cells which we have all heard of they help us fight infections and Cancers to develop a response to these antigens or make other cells which might make antibodies to these antigens so all of this immune response then slowly begins to develop and just like you may see with whether it's measles vaccines or hepatitis vaccines there are there is more than one shot so the initial shot exposes the immune system to these antigens and the immune system says aha I know what I'm supposed to do and subsequent shots or booster shots that train the immune system even better to mount a long-term immune response and that is the goal of vaccines in general cancer vaccines as well and very specifically this antimyeloma vaccine gvax the gene the gvac comes from the gmcsf which is part of the vaccine construct do vaccines reduce tumor burden vaccines work by stimulating the immune response to better recognize and kill the myeloma cell itself I think if you think about how vaccines work in the prophylactic setting what it does is that it trains our body to either generate antibodies or to generate T Cell responses so that when our bodies ultimately see that thing that we've been vaccinated against whether it's polio or influenza that we can much more quickly mount an immune response and effectively kill that virus or bacteria or whatever it is that we're trying to kill in terms of tumor vaccines the concept is a very different one we are trying to augment the ability to eradicate the disease and the way it's being done is by training the immune system to more effectively recognize the tumor and kill it and so it does work through killing the tumor cells it probably works through killing tumors that are present that are relatively low disease burden what side effects are being seen with myeloma vaccines yeah so I think in contrast to car T cells which as I mentioned to you have can have patients hospitalized with ICU and some of the problems that we've seen with the checkpoint Inhibitors or the pd1 where as I mentioned earlier the FDA closed the trials down because of increased mortality what we're seeing with vaccines is a very very tolerable side effect profile virtually the side effects are limited to some local injection site reactions redness itching and that's pretty much it so in this spectrum of things they are probably the safest therapies that we currently have available in terms in the realm of immunotherapy to treat patients have vaccines been used in treating myeloma there were two examples of a vaccine one in prostate cancer one in melanoma that did receive approval these I think are clearly works in progress in other words they showed some effect but what the whole field is really sort of experiencing now is that there's been a fundamental change in the our understanding of the biology of how the immune system works in cancer and so even things like checkpoint Inhibitors which became a huge way we treat certain solid tumors didn't exist you know 10 years ago because we didn't understand that that was an important way that the immune system was educated vaccines in some ways are much older and there's a long history of people trying to apply them and not working very well because they didn't understand some of these other principles things that stimulate the immune system or things that are part of the cancer environment that prevent the immune system from working well we're not part of those original vaccines and so what we're hoping is that this newer generation will take those pieces maybe integrate with some of the other therapies and be successful [Music]

Channel: HealthTree University Myeloma

Views: 400

Keywords:

Id: UN-SbnEKKBA

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022