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Cancer Therapy: Clinical |
Authors' Affiliations: Departments of 1 Medical Oncology, and 2 Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Division of Medical Oncology, Brigham and Women's Hospital; 3 Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; and 4 MGI Pharma Biologics, Lexington, Massachusetts
Requests for reprints: Lee M. Nadler, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney Street, Boston, MA 02115. Phone: 617-632-4939; Fax: 617-632-3541; E-mail: lee_nadler{at}dfci.harvard.edu.
| Abstract |
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Experimental Design: ZYC300, a plasmid DNA of CYP1B1 encapsulated in biodegradable poly-DL-lactide-coglycolide microparticles, was used in a phase I clinical trial to treat 17 patients with advanced stage, progressive cancer. ZYC300 was administered i.m. at a fixed dose of 400 µg every other week for up to 12 doses.
Results: Thirteen patients received six vaccinations and five received all 12 doses. No significant adverse events were observed. Six patients developed immunity to CYP1B1, three of whom developed disease stabilization. All but 1 of 11 patients who did not develop immunity to CYP1B1 progressed and did not respond to salvage therapy. Five patients who developed immunity to CYP1B1 required salvage therapy for progressive metastatic disease and showed marked response to their next treatment regimen, most of which lasted longer than 1 year.
Conclusions: The association between immunity to CYP1B1 and response to next salvage therapy was not expected. Because six of the seven patients who had clinical benefit regardless of the nature of salvage therapy had developed immunity to CYP1B1, it seems highly unlikely that this occurred by chance alone. Regardless of the mechanism(s) that induced tumor regression, these findings force us to rethink how the generation of antitumor immunity might be integrated into the treatment of cancer.
Key Words: DNA vaccine universal tumor antigen immunotherapy
The carcinogen activator cytochrome P450 1B1 (CYP1B1) is an extrahepatic xenobiotic drug-metabolizing member of the cytochrome P450 family of monooxygenases that has been implicated in carcinogenesis (11, 12). In contrast to other cytochromes, CYP1B1 is not expressed in human adult liver and does not have a major role in hepatic metabolism (13). CYP1B1 protein is expressed by virtually all human tumors and little heterogeneity of expression is observed within individual tumors. In contrast, protein expression in adult normal tissues is rare, but there is low-level expression in ureter, fallopian tube, breast, and uterus (14), as well as in monocytes and short-term cultured fibroblasts (15, 16). Mass spectrometric analysis has shown that CYP1B1 peptides are presented by HLA-A*0201 and these peptides serve as targets for antigen-specific cytotoxic T cells (14). Cytotoxicity was achieved in vitro against a wide variety of tumor cell lines and tumor cells, whereas there was no cytotoxicity against a panel of normal cells, including monocytes and immortalized fibroblasts (14). Taken together, these data suggest that CYP1B1 can function as a nearly universal tumor antigen and supported investigation of CYP1B1-directed vaccination for the treatment of human cancer.
In the results reported below, we describe a safety and feasibility study of vaccination with ZYC300, a plasmid encoding an inactivated form of the CYP1B1 DNA formulated within biodegradable poly-DL-lactide-coglycolide microparticles, a strategy previously shown to elicit T-cellmediated responses (17, 18). Seventeen patients with advanced-stage cancer were vaccinated for up to 12 vaccinations. We show that this approach is safe and although T-cellmediated responses were generated, no autoimmunity was observed. Intriguingly, all patients who increased anti-CYP1B1 immunity had significantly improved response to their next therapy and this seems to be associated with clinical benefit.
| Materials and Methods |
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Study design
The primary objective of the study was to determine the safety, tolerability, and feasibility of administering at least 6 and up to 12 doses of ZYC300 every other week. The secondary objectives were to determine the immunologic response to CYP1B1 antigen before and after treatment and to associate any clinical activity with the number of doses given. The study was conducted as an open-label, fixed-dose, single-arm phase 1 trial. The investigational agent was given i.m. in alternating lateral quadriceps at 400 µg DNA/dose once every 2 weeks.
Clinical assessments
Dose-limiting toxicity was defined as grade 2 allergic or autoimmune reactions or any grade 3 or higher hematologic or nonhematologic toxicities. Initially, the study was open to enrollment of 15 subjects. To ensure safety, accrual was constrained by the number of dose-limiting toxicity observed within the first six injections given to the first cohort of 15 subjects. Patients were evaluated regularly for local tolerability, adverse events, and laboratory evidence of toxicity. Following the initial injection, immunologic testing for anti-CYP1B1 reactivity was done at weeks 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, and 22. At a posttreatment visit, all safety and immunology studies, tumor markers, tumor staging, and, if feasible, tumor biopsy was to be repeated.
Immunologic monitoring
IFN-
ELISPOT was used to monitor T-cell activity. All assays were done in triplicate and run with appropriate positive [phytohemagglutinin (PHA); cytomegalovirus, Epstein Barr virus, influenza virus (CEF)] and negative (media alone) controls.
Peptides. Synthetic peptides based on the full-length sequence of CYP1B1 were used as reagents in immune assays. The peptides were 30 amino acids in length and prepared by Boc/benzyl-based chemistry. The peptides were purified by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography and verified by mass spectral analysis. After purification, the peptides were mixed and used as a pool. The CEF peptides were obtained from the NIH AIDS Research and Reference Reagent Program (http://www.aidsreagent.org/).
Isolation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Approximately 50 mL of heparinized venous blood samples were drawn during each subject visit. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) were isolated by centrifugation on a Ficoll-Paque gradient (Amersham Pharmacia Biotech AB, Uppsala, Sweden) and stored in a freezing medium containing 90% FCS (JRH Biosciences, Lenexa, KS), 10% DMSO (Sigma Aldrich, St. Louis, MO). All PBMC samples were aliquoted at a concentration of 5 x 106/mL and stored frozen overnight at 80°C before transfer to liquid nitrogen where they were maintained in the vapor phase.
ELISPOT assay. To limit interassay variability, the entire set of patient-derived samples taken at all visits were thawed and run simultaneously in single large format assay on the same day. On the day of the assay, sufficient numbers of PBMCs were thawed and washed twice with PBMC wash medium [RPMI (JRH Lifescience, Lenexa, KS) containing 1% penicillin-streptomycin (Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA) and 1% HEPES buffer (Life Technologies)]. PBMC samples were then counted in trypan blue (Life Technologies). The samples were adjusted to the appropriate viable cell concentration in PBMC medium and with no prior in vitro sensitization step, 4 x 105 viable PBMCs per well were added directly for 24 hours in the ELISPOT assay (R&D Systems, Inc., Minneapolis, MN). All steps involving plate development were done according to the manufacturer's instructions. Once developed, the plates were dried at room temperature and then shipped to Zellnet Consulting, Inc. (New York, NY), for counting via the ELISPOT reader system (Carl Zeiss Vision, Germany) with KS ELISPOT 4.0 software. Results were reported as spot-forming cells per 106 PBMCs. All spot counting was done without knowledge of the experimental design or patient status. The criteria to define ELISPOT responses were as defined by Russell et al. (19), but based on the intra-assay and inter-assay variability was determined to be 20 spot-forming cells per 106 PBMCs after subtraction of negative control and a >2-fold change from baseline was required to be considered significant. The standard operating procedure established for the assay rejected any PBMC sample with >100 spot-forming cells per 106 PBMCs in the negative control wells. The upper range for PHA-positive controls were set to 2,000 spot-forming cells per 106 PBMCs and samples with >100 spot-forming cells per 106 PBMCs in media alone tests were disqualified.
Statistical considerations
To protect subject safety, safety rules were established such that the trial was to be terminated if the estimated rate of dose-limiting toxicity assessed as grade 2 autoimmune, or other grade 3 toxicity was 33% or higher, or if any grade 4 toxicities determined to be related to ZYC300 were observed. It was anticipated from this population of the advanced-stage cancer patients that 50% would have progressive disease during treatment and that only half of the subjects entered would complete at least six injections. Therefore, the design called for closing the study to new subject entry when 15 subjects had completed the sixth injection. All quantitative measures were assessed in triplicate. Results are presented descriptively, with exact binomial confidence intervals for binary outcomes and with median and range of changes from baseline for quantitative outcomes. Clinical response was addressed descriptively. Immune responses were assessed as secondary end points in this study. For quantitatively measured outcomes, a positive response was determined by comparing posttreatment measurements with baseline measurements.
| Results |
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Development of immune response to CYP1B1. We assessed baseline immunity and response to vaccination to CYP1B1 by measuring IFN-
ELISPOT responses to nonoverlapping CYP1B1 peptides spanning the entire molecule. Patients were assessed as responders if at any time point they had
2-fold increase from their pretreatment baseline levels as defined in the Materials and Methods. Six patients developed an immune response to CYP1B1, whereas the remaining 11 patients did not (Table 1). The patterns of the immune response following vaccinations of these six patients and representative results from four patients who did not develop immunity to CYP1B1 are shown in Fig. 1. As shown, there was significant heterogeneity in the number of cycles required to induce peak CYP1B1 immunity, ranging from two to six cycles. Immunity to CYP1B1 in the peripheral blood did not persist but largely returned to baseline from the sixth cycle onwards.
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| Discussion |
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In view of the association between the development of immunity to CYP1B1 and response to salvage therapy, we sought to determine why some patients developed CYP1B1 immunity whereas others did not. We had predetermined successful immunity to CYP1B1 as a doubling over prevaccination values of the ELISPOT IFN-
responses to the pool of CYP1B1 peptides and six patients achieved this standard. Neither age, sex, type of malignancy, performance status, nor sites of metastatic disease were predictive for induction of immunity. The only prevaccination demographic that predicted for the development of immunity to CYP1B1 was the number of prior treatment regimens (median of 2 for responders versus 4 for nonresponders). Baseline response to CYP1B1 was not predictive for response to CYP1B1 vaccination. However, the wide variability in baseline immunity to CYP1B1 was striking. All five patients who had >100 spots/106 cells had either ovarian (n = 4) or breast (n = 1) cancer. Whether this represents reactivity against antigen-positive normal tissue or evidence of a prior immune response to their tumors is not known. Although this level of response could potentially be due to gender, women who did not have ovarian or breast cancer did not have elevated baseline CYP1B1 responses. We expected that those patients who had received more treatment regimens before vaccination would be less immunocompetent and indeed these patients had decreased PHA responses. However, we cannot conclude that patients who had received greater number of treatment regimens lacked the ability to mount a T-cellmediated response because they had normal T-cell responses to the pool of CEF peptides. The number of vaccinations received was associated with development of immunity to CYP1B1. This might suggest that the administration of more vaccinations progressively boosts anti-CYP1B1 immunity. However, this was not what we observed. All patients who developed immunity to CYP1B1 had done so between two and six vaccinations and in no patient did the level of immunity increase with further vaccination. It should be stressed that we are only measuring immunity in the peripheral blood and it is possible that antigen-specific lymphocytes traffic to normal lymphoid organs and/or tumor sites. In addition, 7 of the 10 patients who did not develop immunity received between six or more vaccinations. Similarly, we cannot conclude that the nonresponders were immunologically tolerant to CYP1B1 because the number of patients with high baseline immunity to CYP1B1 was comparable in the responder and nonresponder groups. One possibility is that those patients who responded had biologically less aggressive disease and that active cancer growth inhibits the ability of the host to develop an immune response to vaccination. Conversely, induction of CYP1B1 immunity may inhibit tumor growth, rather than tumor growth inhibiting immunity. Taken together, these observations suggest that additional mechanisms, potentially immunosuppressive in nature, are operative in selecting which patients will develop immunity to CYP1B1. This hypothesis will be evaluated in subsequent trials to analyze the number and types of regulatory T cells and/or suppressive cytokines before and after vaccination.
The most intriguing finding is the association between induction of immunity and response to next salvage therapy. As stated above, patients who did or did not develop immunity to CYP1B1 seemed comparable with regard to clinical characteristics except for the numbers of previous treatment regimens and vaccinations. The most trivial explanation of these data is that development of immunity to CYP1B1 is simply a surrogate that selects those patients will would respond to their next treatment regimen. The most compelling argument against this is that we rarely see patients respond dramatically with such durable clinically significant responses to third line therapy, although it must be stressed that these patients are heterogeneous and the numbers small. The fact that all six patients who developed immunity seemed to derive clinical benefit argues that this is unlikely to be due to chance alone. Rather than concluding that immunity to CYP1B1 is merely a surrogate marker, we hypothesize that immunity to CYP1B1 primes for response to salvage therapy. Whether the mechanism of response is immunologically mediated or whether the generation of anti-CYP1B1 immunity has biologically altered tumor cell resistance or the microenvironment, we believe that these results are of considerable interest and should be verified and further explored. We, therefore, present these data as a hypothesis to be addressed in ongoing and future tumor vaccine studies. Such studies should determine not only which patients develop immunity but also whether patients who develop immunity can be given additional therapy, including conventional antitumor drugs or agents that either enhance immunity or reverse immune suppression to induce clinically beneficial responses.
| Footnotes |
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Received 10/15/04; revised 3/ 6/05; accepted 3/18/05.
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