Neoantigen vaccines in cancer immunotherapy: a breakthrough in renal cell carcinoma

Interviewer: Today, we are joined by Dr. David Braun from Yale School of Medicine to discuss his groundbreaking study on personalized neoantigen cancer vaccines in renal cell carcinoma, which demonstrates promising immune responses in long-term disease control. Dr. Braun, it's great to have you with us. Dr. Braun: Thank you so much for having me today. Interviewer: By way of background, can you start with a brief introduction to the current state of neoantigen-targeting personalized cancer vaccines, or PCVs? Dr. Braun: Yes, absolutely. I think to understand personalized cancer vaccines and how we can target neoantigens, it's maybe helpful to take a bit of a step back of where we are in cancer immunotherapy. When I started my internal medicine training well over a decade ago, the standard paradigm for the treatment of metastatic solid tumors, things like lung cancer or breast cancer, in this case, kidney cancer, there were very meaningful agents. For some cancers, there were chemotherapies, for others, there were precision medicines, targeted therapies, but none of those, with very rare exceptions, really provided the chance for long-term disease control or even cure. What was so revolutionary about the idea of immune therapies at the time of immune checkpoint inhibitors was this idea of producing long-term disease control. But if you think about how those classic immune checkpoint inhibitors work, the ones that are now so common in many types of cancer, pembrolizumab or keytruda, nivolumab or opdivo, they essentially function by taking the foot off the brake of the immune system and letting the immune system do its job, turn on, activate, and ideally recognize and attack cancer cells.