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Vaccines for the Treatment of Prostate and Breast Cancer

Keywords:  Vaccine, cancer, TARP, T-cell, receptor, antigen, peptide, immunotherapy

Summary:  
The National Cancer Institute (NCI), Vaccine Branch  is seeking  statements of capability or interest from parties interested in collaborative research to further co-develop a prostate cancer vaccine targeting the TARP antigen.

Technology:  
Current treatments of cancer often involve non-specific strategies (such as chemotherapy) that attack healthy cells as well as diseased cells, leading to harmful side-effects.  As a result, the development of more targeted means of treating cancer are highly sought. One option for a targeted treatment is the creation of a vaccine that induces an immune response only against cancer cells.  In this sense, vaccination involves the introduction of a peptide into a patient that causes the formation of T cells that recognize the peptide.  If those recognize a peptide found in a protein selectively found on cancer cells, the T cells can trigger the death of those cancer cells without harming non-cancer cells.  This can result in fewer side effects for the patient.  

TARP (T cell receptor gamma alternate reading frame protein) is a protein that is selectively expressed on the cells of certain types of prostate and breast cancer.  This invention concerns the identification of  immunogenic peptides within TARP, and their use to create an anti-cancer immune response in patients.  By introducing these peptides into a patient, an immune response against these cancer cells can be initiated by the peptides, resulting in treatment of the cancer.  A phase I clinical trial in stage D0 prostate cancer patients is nearing completion.  Initial results indicate a statistically significant decrease in the slope of PSA for 48 weeks after vaccination.

Competitive Advantages:

• Targeted therapy decreases non-specific killing of healthy, essential cells, resulting in fewer non-specific side-effects and healthier patients

Development Stage: Pre-clinical and clinical.  in vivo animal and human data available.

Patent Status:  

• US Patents7,541,035 (06/02/ 2009) and 8,043,623 (10/25/2011)

Publications:    
1.  Epel M, et al. Targeting TARP, a novel breast and prostate tumor-associated antigen, with T cell receptor-like human recombinant antibodies. Eur J Immunol. 2008 Jun;38(6):1706-1720.  [PMID 18446790]
2.  Oh S, et al. Human CTLs to wild-type and enhanced epitopes of a novel prostate and breast tumor-associated protein, TARP, lyse human breast cancer cells. Cancer Res. 2004 Apr 1;64(7):2610-2618.  [PMID 15059918]

Contact:
Please submit an information request form at  http://techtransfer.cancer.gov or contact:
John D. Hewes, Ph.D., (301) 435-3121, hewesj@mail.nih.gov.

Last updated: 05/01/2012

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