Cancer Immunotherapy Summary

The PancreAss Kickers will take a personalized adoptive cell transfer and cancer vaccination immunotherapy approach to eradicating pancreatic cancer. Identification of expressed and immunologically active tumor-specific neoantigens in each patient will be performed in vitro and resulting neoantigens will be engineered into two genes. One gene construct will be incorporated into dendritic cells grown from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and will express the neoantigens endogenously, while the other will be incorporated into eosinophils and will result in the secretion of neoantigens into the extracellular environment due to a signal sequence. After dendritic cell activation, presentation of neoantigens via MHC classes I and II will lead to subsequent activation of both CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Both types of T cells along with dendritic cells and PBMCs will be incorporated into a vaccine administered to the patient, and the resulting immune response to the pancreatic cancer will abolish it.