*Please note the Pre-Conference Focus Day has been Cancelled*
8:00 am Registration Opens
8:50 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Optimizing Cancer Vaccine Delivery, Antigen Selection, Identification, & Validation
9:00 am Transcriptional Instability in Prostate Cancer as a Source of Shared Neoantigens
Synopsis
- Identify a novel instability in cancer wherein cancer cells alter their transcriptional machinery and generate highly recurrent de novo RNA transcripts while maintaining a wild type genome status
- These aberrant transcription programs result in gene fusions and alternative RNA splicing that could generate long stretches of novel amino acid sequences.
- Our data supports the hypothesis that these aberrant transcription events generate an unanticipated and reproducible vulnerability that could be exploited for various therapeutic modalities.
9:30 am Sargramostim as a Vaccine Adjuvant
Synopsis
- GM-CSF induction of non-lymphoid tissue-resident dendritic cells (DCs) is
imperative for CD8+ T cell responses, leading to a history of GM-CSF use as an
adjuvant in numerous vaccines. - Studies have reported both increased immune responses and immune
suppression, depending upon GM-CSF dosage and frequency. - Concurrent strategies to suppress immunoregulatory cells may enhance GMCSF-
mediated DC induction as a strategy to boost adjuvanticity in emerging
vaccine therapies.
10:00 am Is there a Single “Best” Platform or will it be “Fit to Purpose”?
Synopsis
- Analysing the advantages, disadvantages and comparisons of the DNA, Peptide, RNA, and Virus-based and other novel vaccine platforms
- Harmonisation of clinical outcomes and immune correlates
- Considering if we can we get better at predictive animal models?
- Questioning what other signals we need to provide to the immune system, either built into the vaccine or given concomitantly (checkpoints, costims, cytokines, innate immunity boosters, etc.
10:30 am Morning Refreshments & Speed Networking
Optimizing Cancer Vaccine Delivery, Combination Therapies, & Antigen Selection Continued
11:15 am Identification and Validation of Neoantigens Resulting from Neo-open Reading Frames
Synopsis
- Combination of the whole genome sequencing with short- and long-RNA sequencing unleashes the full potential of cancer neoantigen discovery
- Showcasing how these technologies allow identification of neo-open reading frame peptides that represent long and completely foreign stretches of amino acids resulting from frame-shift mutations and genomic rearrangements in tumor tissue
- Identifying and validating several neo-open reading frame peptides as neoantigens suitable for both off-the-shelf and personalized cancer vaccines
11:45 am Panel Discussion: How can biotechs best leverage partnerships early on in drug development to ensure cancer vaccine success?
Synopsis
- Assessing the importance of bringing in the right staff from the field
- Developing the science and the story in early development to attract potential
partners, when you don’t have clinical data available - Attributes of a perfect partnership
- Types of partnerships (in/out licensing of product, financing of clinical trial,
providing comparator drug, etc.) - Key partnerships crucial at different timepoints
- Evidence from the field where effective partnerships have resulted in key
developments
12:15 pm Lunch and Networking
1:15 pm Viral Vectored Vaccines Targeting Many Neoantigens elicit effective anti-tumor T cell immunity and response in combination with anti-PD1
Synopsis
- Nouscom proprietary engineered viral vectors encoding large number of tumor
neoantigens elicit strong immune response and effectively synergize with
checkpoint inhibitors (CPI) to eradicate large tumors in preclinical models - Effectiveness of vaccination is CD8 mediated and correlates with expansion and
diversification of the intratumoral T cell repertoire - Clinical development in indications with high Tumor Mutational Burden
responsive to CPI, with an off-the-shelf vaccine targeting 209 shared frameshift
mutations for treatment of MSI tumors and a personalized vaccine targeting
up to 60 neoantignes for treatment of NSCLC and melanoma: preliminary
clinical evidence
1:45 pm Leveraging innate and adaptive mechanisms of anticancer immunity with IV heterologous vaccination
Synopsis
- SNAPvaxTM is a self-assembling nanoparticle codelivering TLR-7/8a and cancer antigens
- ChAdOx is an adenovirus that can be programmed to encode cancer antigens and has been demonstrated to be safe and effective for inducing T cell immunity in patients
- Intravenous heterologous prime boost with SNAPvax and ChAdOx results in improved tumor clearance in preclinical animal models through two distinct mechanisms of action: (i) direct innate activation and reversal of suppressive populations within tumors, and (ii) induction of high magnitude T cells responses that mediate tumor killing.
2:15 pm Vaccines that Selectively Induce Type I T-cell Responses to Tumor Associated Antigens
Synopsis
- Discovery of new molecular targets for cancer immunotherapies
- Clinical trial data testing HER-2–based cancer vaccines
2:45 pm Altering the Human Prostate Tumor Immune Microenvironment Through Inhibition of Ibrutinib
Synopsis
- This is the first clinical trial of the BTK inhibitor ibrutinib in prostate cancer
- Ibrutinib may alter favorably alter the prostate tumor microenvironment by reducing pro-tumor B cells and increasing anti-tumor T cells
- Inhibition of BTK may also limit tumor cell-intrinsic growth
- Prostate tissue and peripheral correlative studies will be performed to evaluate the further use of ibrutinib in prostate cance