Germany tests mutationspecific vaccine against malignant brain tumours

For the first time, physicians and cancer researchers from Heidelberg and Mannheim have carried out a clinical trial to test a mutationspecific vaccine against malignant brain tumours. The vaccine proved to be safe and triggered the desired immune response in the tumour tissue. Diffuse gliomas are usually incurable brain tumours that spread in the brain and are difficult to remove completely by surgery. In many cases, diffuse gliomas share a common feature: in more than 70 per cent of patients, the tumour cells have the same gene mutation. An identical error in the DNA causes a single, specific protein building block to be exchanged in the IDH1 enzyme. This creates a novel protein structure, known as a neo-epitope, which can be recognized as foreign by the patient’s immune system. The team had already generated an artificial version of the segment of the IDH1 protein with the characteristic mutation several years ago. This mutation-specific peptide vaccine was able to halt the growth of IDH1-mutated cancer cells in mice. In 2019, Platten was awarded the German Cancer Prize for this discovery. Encouraged by these results, they decided to test the mutation-specific vaccine for the first time in a phase I study in patients newly diagnosed with IDH1mutated glioma (WHO grades III and IV astrocytomas).