Dialogues

Oct 5, 2024, 12:56

ASCO24 Updates: Dr. Scott Norberg on Breakthrough HPV Vaccine for RRP | PRGN-2012 Clinical Trial

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Dr. Scott Norberg from the National Cancer Institute, shared insights on ‘PRGN-2012, a novel gorilla adenovirus-based immunotherapy, provides the first treatment that leads to complete and durable responses in recurrent respiratory papillomatosis patients.‘

My name is Scott Norberg. I’m an associate research physician at the National Cancer Institute, and today I’ll talk about my clinical trial testing therapeutic HPV vaccine in patients with recurrent respiratory papillomatosis. So RRP is a chronic, lifelong disease caused by chronic infection with HPV6 or 11.

Results in the growth of benign tumors in the upper and respiratory tract. These tumors cause airway obstruction and shortness of breath in patients, also can lead to vocal dysfunction, and in some patients invasive cancer. The current standard of care treatment is surgery in order to remove the papillomas.

This can lead to substantial morbidity for patients, including scarring of the larynx and trachea, and also financial toxicity, not just on the individual patient, but as the healthcare treatment, healthcare in general. So unfortunately, there’s no systemic treatments. We have developed and are testing a therapeutic HPV vaccine called PRGN-2012.

This vaccine is designed to elicit a HPV6 and 11 T-cell response in order to eliminate papilloma infected cells. We presented our data from a phase 1, 2 clinical trial where patients underwent an initial standard of care clean out surgery, followed by four administrations of PRGN-2012 given on day 0, 15, 43, and 85. So over a three month treatment course, we looked at safety and whether or not patients were able to avoid having further repeat surgeries in the 12 months following treatment.

What we found is that PRGN-2012 was safe and well tolerated with only mild grade 1 to 2 adverse events, akin to what would be seen with a seasonal vaccine, such as injection site reaction, chills, and fever. And remarkably, with the 35 patients that we treated in the recommended phase 2 dose, we saw a greater than 50% complete response rate, which meaning those patients didn’t require a single intervention in the 12 months following the one-time treatment course. We hope to be able to continue to further develop this therapy.

It really is a novel systemic treatment in a disease population where it currently is unavailable.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.