) The work in this proposal will build on our early translational experience in cancer vaccine therapeutics in the hopes of improving the clinical results over those from the initial human trial, to expand our evidence that cancer vaccine therapies are able to stimulate the immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells in humans, and to better understand how best to monitor the immune response in cancer patients.
The specific aims are: (1) to determine the optimum administration schedule based on enhancement of T-cell activity of two CEA-targeting vaccines to generate an enhanced anti-tumor immune response in patients with CEA-bearing cancers; (2) to determine the role of GM-CSF and/or IL-2 in further enhancing the T-cell immune response following vaccination with CEA-targeting vaccines in patients with CEA-bearing cancers; (3) to determine whether tumor burden plays a role in a patient's immunologic response to these two CEA-targeting vaccines by comparing the T-cell response of patients without evidence of disease to those with radiographically evident disease, and (4) to document any evidence of anti-tumor activity in patients with advanced cancer and determine if a correlation exists between response (if responses are seen) and degree of immunologic enhancement.
