WASHINGTON, June 7 (UPI) -- A phase 2 trial of a vaccine for metastatic malignant melanoma has met its clinical goals and is proceeding to full enrollment.
The trial is sponsored by the Baylor Health Care System, and its two-phase design required that at least one positive response had to occur in the first 19 patients before the trial would be allowed to proceed.
That positive response was seen in the study's first six participants, so the researchers will recruit all 32 planned subjects.
The team is using an autologous dendritic cell vaccine produced by ODC Therapy, a cancer immunotherapy company started by the Baylor Health Care System in 2004.
The vaccine is generated from killed allogeneic tumor cell lines and can be frozen, which makes it possible to produce a full series of vaccinations from a single blood collection.
The treatment is also being tested in another phase 2 trial in combination with a non-cytotoxic dose of cyclophosphamide. In low doses, cyclophophamide kills regulatory T cells that researchers think interfere with the development of an immune response to the vaccine.
Anna Karolina Palucka of the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research presented the current results of the trial to the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) on June 4 in Atlanta.
