Patrick Ott, MD, PhD The personalized cancer vaccine research paradigm is expanding, with particular advancements occurring in patients with high-risk melanoma, in whom vaccines have been shown to induce and strengthen responses to immunotherapy, according to Patrick Ott, MD, PhD. 1 “The idea is to induce active immunity that’s durable,” Ott said of cancer vaccines during a presentation at The New York Academy of Sciences Frontiers in Cancer Immunotherapy Symposium 2024. “I would argue that one of the big advantages of T-cell vaccines are that the type of T cells that they can generate are potentially long lasting and effective.
.. [These T cells] will be exclusively present in the tumor and novel to the immune system.
” In the presentation, Ott highlighted several examples of studies that have displayed early efficacy signals with cancer vaccines, the potential clinical implications of this treatment modality in patients with melanoma, and future directions for research in randomized trials for this patient population. Ott is the clinical director of the Melanoma Disease Center, the director of Clinical Sciences at the Center for Immuno-Oncology, and a senior physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, both of which are located in in Boston, Massachusetts. Findings from a phase 1 trial (NCT01970358) evaluated the use of NeoVax, a long peptide poly-ICLC vaccine consisting of 20 predicted personal .
