Neoantigen vaccines: Promising, but no panacea

A new study of a "cancer vaccine" suggests that the experimental, personalized therapies, when combined with immunotherapies, may improve outcomes. But the benefits they confer still appear somewhat modest — adding just a few extra months of progression-free survival in some cancers.

The small Phase 1b study, sponsored by Neon Therapeutics, tracked 21 patients with metastatic bladder cancer, 27 with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, and 34 with metastatic melanoma.

The melanoma patients taking these neoantigen therapies did best of all: After 13.4 months, less than half the patients experienced cancer growth or further metastasis. By comparison, the median progression-free survival for metastatic melanoma tends to be three to seven months when patients take checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies alone.

“So this is above the range,” Kristen Mueller of the Melanoma Research Alliance told STAT’s Sharon Begley. “Still, I’d want to know how durable the benefit is.”