MT1999-06-VACCINATION WITH TETANUS AND KLH TO ASSESS IMMUNE RESPONSES

这个子项目是许多研究子项目中利用 资源由NIH/NCRR资助的中心拨款提供。子项目和 调查员(PI)可能从NIH的另一个来源获得了主要资金， 并因此可以在其他清晰的条目中表示。列出的机构是 该中心不一定是调查人员的机构。 我们一直在努力实现使用免疫疗法防止癌症复发的目标。这种疗法的一个方面是使用癌症疫苗刺激特定的免疫力。然而，肿瘤是异质性的，我们假设癌症本身的存在，癌症化疗，或更激进的治疗，如骨髓移植，可能是免疫抑制。如果这是真的，在我们能够克服这种免疫抑制之前，癌症疫苗将不会有效。我们假设免疫刺激性细胞因子可能对此目的有用。如果一个人使用癌症疫苗策略，但它失败了，目前还不清楚失败是由于癌症疫苗本身，还是更广泛地说，对任何疫苗缺乏反应性。为了克服这个问题，在这个方案中，我们将测试两种特性良好且具有很强免疫原性的疫苗。破伤风类毒素已经使用了几十年，几乎所有人都有过这种情况。KLH是一种外来蛋白，自20世纪70年代初S以来一直用于评估免疫反应。KLH的主要优点是它测试对一种个人以前没有接触过的抗原(所谓的抗原)的免疫反应。我们将使用破伤风和KLH来回答一个非常基本的问题，即癌症患者是否有足够的免疫能力来对正常献血者100%具有免疫原性的蛋白质做出反应。在这个方案中，我们将根据患者的疾病类型、标准化疗量以及他们是否接受过干细胞移植来对患者进行分层。GCRC在该方案中的作用将是同时给予肌肉内和皮下注射的疫苗，监测毒性，并收集研究测试所需的血液样本，以评估免疫反应。

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. We have been striving toward a goal of using immunotherapy to prevent cancer relapse. One facet of this therapy is to stimulate specific immunity using cancer vaccines. However, tumors are heterogeneous and we hypothesize that the presence of cancer itself, cancer chemotherapy, or more aggressive therapies such as bone marrow transplants may be immunosuppressive. If this is true, cancer vaccines will not be effective until we can overcome this immunosuppression. We hypothesize that immune stimulating cytokines may be useful for this purpose. If one uses a cancer vaccine strategy and it fails, it is unclear whether failure is due to the cancer vaccine itself or a more generalized lack of responsiveness to any vaccine. To overcome this problem, in this protocol we will test two vaccines which are well characterized and very immunogenic. Tetanus toxoid has been used for decades and almost all individuals have had this. KLH, a foreign protein has been used since the early 1970's to assess immune responses. The major advantage of KLH is that it tests immune response to an antigen that individuals have not had prior exposure to (a so-called antigen). We will use tetanus and KLH to answer a very basic question of whether cancer patients have enough immune competence to respond to proteins which are 100% immunogenic in normal donors. In this protocol, we will stratify patients by their disease type, the amount of standard chemotherapy, and whether or not they will have undergone stem cell transplantation. The role of the GCRC in this protocol would be to administer both vaccines which are given intramuscularly and subcutaneously, to monitor toxicity, and to collect blood samples required for research tests to assess immune response.