Thanks Dew, I like this part of it;
With so many combination trials underway, experts are watching closely for the slightest evidence that vaccines can actually augment progress already made with checkpoint inhibitors. Big pharma is, naturally, playing a wide field. “We want to target all steps,” says David Berman, senior vice president and head of oncology innovative medicine at AstraZeneca subsidiary MedImmune (Gaithersburg, MD, USA). “We believe in a broad platform—antibodies, fusion proteins, oncolytic viruses and tumor vaccines.”
However, it is clear that Berman, like Pfizer's Merson, puts checkpoint inhibitors at the top. “I think the checkpoint inhibitors are the key thing,” he says. “We have ipilimumab, and the ability to combine vaccines with checkpoint inhibitors, that's what has ignited the field.” Harlan Robins, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and co-founder of the immunosequencing company Adaptive Biotechnologies (both in Seattle), agrees: checkpoint inhibitors make it a whole new paradigm. “We can show through some of our tools that the vaccines are truly able to induce an immune response against the epitopes that are expressed in cancer,” he adds. The problem now, as before, is going from there to being able to have clinical efficacy against advanced cancer. A strong enough immune response is needed, as well as epitope spreading, among other factors. “But having this big hammer behind you of anti-CTLA4 or anti-PD-1 might get the response big enough to be functional. We haven't really reaped the benefits but I think we will,” Robins says.
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