Portrait of an autologous cancer vaccine: Then and now.

Active immunotherapy of cancer with therapeutic vaccines has been the subject of experimental and clinical studies for at least 50 years. Our approach has employed 1) autologous, human cancer cells because of extensive evidence that tumor rejection antigens may differ between multiple tumors of the same histology; 2) the immunopotentiating drug, cyclophosphamide; and 3) haptens, particularly dinitrophenyl. Multiple clinical trials in 455 patients with melanoma and ovarian cancer have shown that administration of haptenized vaccines at the proper dosage-schedule regularly induces T cell-mediated immunity to autologous tumor cells as measured by delayed-type hypersensitivity.

Double-blinded, randomized phase II study using embolization with or without granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor in uveal melanoma with hepatic metastases.

Purpose: To investigate the effects of immunoembolization with granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in patients with uveal melanoma (UM) with liver-only metastasis.

Materials And Methods: In this double-blind phase II clinical trial, patients were randomized to undergo immunoembolization or bland embolization (BE). Lobar treatment was performed with GM-CSF or normal saline solution mixed with ethiodized oil followed by embolization with gelatin sponge emulsified with iodinated contrast medium.

A tale of two pities: autologous melanoma vaccines on the brink.

This paper reviews and compares two autologous vaccine technologies for human melanoma that failed to obtain marketing approval after 10-15 y of clinical development-the HSP vaccine invented by Srivastava and developed by the company, Antigenics, and the hapten-modified cellular vaccine invented by Berd and developed by AVAX Technologies. Both vaccines had a strong basic science background with a well-understood mechanism of action. The HSP vaccine failed in a phase III pivotal trial, while the haptenized cellular vaccine was never adequately tested in a phase III trial because of regulatory and financial problems.

Interleukin 6 mediates production of interleukin 10 in metastatic melanoma.

We previously reported that substantial amounts of IL-10, an immunomodulatory cytokine, are produced by cell suspensions of fresh human metastatic melanoma tissues. Production diminished with continuous culturing of cells, which suggests a pivotal interactive role between melanoma cells and the tumor microenvironment. In this study, we found that the culture media obtained from LPS-stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells induced IL-10 production by metastatic melanoma cells.

Lymph node ratio is an important and independent prognostic factor for patients with stage III melanoma.

Introduction: The incidence of melanoma is dramatically increasing worldwide. We hypothesized that the ratio of metastatic to examined lymph node ratio (LNR) would be the most important prognostic factor for stage III patients.

Methods: We retrospectively reviewed our institutional database of melanoma patients and identified 168 patients who underwent lymph node dissection (LND) for stage III disease between 1993 and 2007.