Periasamy Selvaraj
Emory University School of Medicine, USA
Title: Designing tumor immunotherapy amidst tumor heterogeneity
Biography
Biography: Periasamy Selvaraj
Abstract
Cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease and mutations that occur in genes and vary patient to patient. Further, recent studies using deep sequencing technology reveal that tumor tissue exhibit high degree of intratumoral heterogeneity harboring multiple clonal populations with the tumor. Therefore, the use of established cell lines as therapeutic vaccines may not represent all the clonal populations and will not be efficacious. Our laboratory has pioneered the development of a therapeutic cancer vaccine design that uses tumor membrane vesicles (TMVs) prepared from tumor tissue and a novel protein transfer technology to adjuvantate them. Using this approach it is feasible to develop cancer vaccines from surgically removed tumor tissues which incorporates all the antigenic variations found in the tissue. In this technology, immuno stimulatory molecules are attached to a glycolipid and then tethered to tumor membranes by a short-incubation, thus eliminating the need for gene transfer or live cells to develop cancer vaccines. The immuno stimulatory molecules incorporated onto tumor membranes serve as adjuvants to boost antitumor immunity against tumor-associated antigens expressed on cancer cell membranes. Experiments using mouse models of cancers have shown that membrane-based cancer vaccines prepared by protein transfer technology can protect mice from live tumor cell challenge suggesting that membrane-based cancer vaccines induce protective antitumor immunity. This personalized therapeutic vaccine approach has the potential to treat cancers where the target antigen is yet to be identified.