Andrew Allen: What an exciting time to be in the field of personalized cancer vaccines

Andrew Allen, President, CEO and Co-Founder at Gritstone Bio, recently shared on LinkedIn:

“Cancer immunotherapy has been profoundly effective, yet extremely challenging to develop. New concepts and combinations, new endpoints, nuanced science – there’s a lot of complexity to the field. But we persevere because we share the goal of improving long-term survival for patients with advanced or life-threatening diseases – and elevating the tail/plateau of the Kaplan-Meier overall survival curve.

Lifting that plateau after several years means people are being functionally cured of advanced disease. This is our goal. This means that folks with metastatic or advanced cancer are being restored to normal life, returned to their families, free of disease, and free of more treatment.

Some good drugs push survival curves to the right – and this is worthy, but not enough. An example of a good drug is Enhertu, which received a standing ovation at ASCO 2 years ago for the below data (DESTINY-breast04) in advanced Her-2-low (primarily hormone receptor-positive) breast cancer (figure on left).

In contrast, in my view, great drugs will lift the survival curve, reflecting functional cures for advanced diseases. Today’s example from ASCO 2024 is below (figure on right) – this is ipi/nivo versus lenvatinib or sorafenib in unresectable liver cancer (Checkmate 9DW). The effect is modest – but this is how it begins.

As we learn more, we can push the tail of the curve up higher. Look at the melanoma data with current immunotherapy and compare it to high-dose IL-2, the first cancer immunotherapy, where I started back in the early 2000s.

Now both data sets below need more follow-up, for sure, but immunotherapy is consistently driving this kind of long-term survival benefit in many patients. And my work at Gritstone each day is focused on trying to accomplish this for patients with a ‘cold’ tumor, or metastatic colorectal cancer.

Our randomized trial with our personalized cancer vaccine (PCV), a very rational approach to augmenting the effects of non-specific immune stimulation with checkpoint inhibitors, will read out with expected mature PFS data in Q3 of this year. Overall survival data will follow next year. We hope to build on the success Moderna/Merck are having with their PCV in adjuvant melanoma. What an exciting time to be in this field!”

Source: Andrew Allen/LinkedIn