Anticancer Gene Therapy Trial In UK

The UK Medicine Control Agency's gene therapy advisory committee has given the go-ahead for an initial, 10-patient study in Addenbrookes' Hospital in Cambridge and the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, for a DNA B-cell lymphoma vaccine derived from the patient's own tumor. The study will be conducted by Robert Hawkins, a senior clinical research fellow at the Cancer Research Campaign and Stephen Russel of the Medicine Research Council's center for protein engineering.

The vaccine is based on the principle of active immunotherapy through idiotypic vaccination. This is made easier, said Dr Hawkins, by the fact that B-cell lymphomas have a true tumor antigen present on their surface (the idiotypic immunoglobulin). Trials of anti-idiotype monoclonal therapy have been carried out with some success, he noted, although, tumor escape is possible through somatic mutations. Active immunotherapy has the attraction that escape from a polyclonal B- and T-cell response will be harder and persisting immunity may be able to control residual dormant tumor should it become active.

Dr Hawkins told the Marketletter that previous attempts to investigate this method had been made almost impossible using conventional cell immortalization techniques. However, the advent of polymerase chain reaction allowed the rapid isolation of antibody genes from source biopsies.