Clinical trial results show that a vaccine against a factor called neoantigen can help prevent the recurrence of kidney cancer.

According to News Medical, a research team led by scientists from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (USA) has successfully tested a personalized cancer vaccine targeting neoantigen to fight renal cell carcinoma.

Neoantigen is a type of antigen produced by tumor cells, originating from specific mutations.

Therefore, according to the research team, a personalized vaccine against neoantigen has the ability to induce an immune response to specific antigenic determinants of cancer cells.

They have developed a vaccine that applies that mechanism. After initial successful trials, they have just entered phase I clinical trials and achieved very good results.

The study volunteers were kidney cancer patients who had undergone surgery to remove their tumors and were considered to have a high risk of recurrence.

After a median of 40 months after surgery and 34 months after starting the vaccine, none of the patients had a recurrence of their cancer, according to the results published in the journal Nature.

Most of the patients vaccinated against the highly immunogenic neoantigen. The vaccination also led to a long-term expansion of new T-cell lines years after the last dose, suggesting a durable immune response.

The scientists are still working to move forward with larger clinical trials, including controlled trials with other relapse prevention therapies.

Even so, the early results suggest that personalized vaccines targeting neoantigens are a promising new frontier in the field of cancer.