The advances allow us to “envision new hope for these patients”, rejoices Nicolas Poirier, director ofOse Immunotherapeutics. Based in Nantes, the French biotechnology company OSE Immunotherapeutics presented on Monday results deemed “positive” of its therapeutic vaccine Tedopi in patients with lung cancer. Therapeutic cancer vaccines aim to educate the immune system to specifically recognize and destroy tumor cells after they appear. The Tedopi vaccine focuses on advanced lung cancers, those for which the first treatment has failed over time.
More than a thousand injections were carried out during the various clinical studies carried out by Ose Immunotherapeutics. The results of a phase 3 clinical trial (last step before marketing) were published Monday in the journal Annals of oncology.
“Fewer side effects”
“One year after the start of treatment, 44.1% of these patients were still alive in the group receiving the vaccine compared to only 27.5% in the chemotherapy group,” indicates the Nantes biotech. “The study also shows that the vaccine instead of chemotherapy makes it possible to maintain a better quality of life for patients” and “fewer side effects”, adds Professor Benjamin Besse, director of clinical research at the Institute. Gustave-Roussy and principal investigator of the trial called Atalante-1.
Tedopi is effective in patients with the HLA-A2 gene, present in half of the population, underlines Ose Immunotherapeutics. Patients entering the randomized trial were previously treated with chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
“The study did not complete its recruitment” because of the arrival of Covid-19 and therefore “does not have the desired power”, admits Benjamin Besse. But “it makes it possible to understand which population has derived real benefit” from the vaccine, namely patients who initially responded to immunotherapy before relapsing.
A total of 219 patients participated in the study in nine European countries and the United States (139 patients on Tedopi and 80 on chemotherapy). The vaccine was initially administered every three weeks, then every eight weeks for a year, then every 12 weeks.