“The innovative approach of Oncode Accelerator can make therapeutic cancer vaccines a success for patients”

Sjoerd (right in picture) is a professor in Immunotherapy on solid tumours at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) and a Senior Investigator at Oncode Institute. He heads the laboratory of Medical Oncology and leads the group of Experimental Cancer Immunology and Therapy. Sebastiaan (left in the picture) is a group leader at the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology and a Junior Investigator at Oncode Institute. Sebastiaan has developed a passion for RNA systems biology, genomics, and cancer immunotherapy. His lab uses advanced sequencing and computational methods to find and characterize new microproteins and immunotherapeutic targets in childhood cancer. 

Understanding Therapeutic Vaccines

Therapeutic cancer vaccines stimulate the immune system to start recognizing the cancer cells as foreign and to attack the tumour. Sjoerd explains: “Therapeutic vaccines play a role in the field of immunotherapy and specifically in the context where spontaneous defences against tumours have failed or were inadequate. Some cancer patients do not develop T-cells against the tumour at all and some patients do develop these cancer-reactive T-cells, but the response is weak or not broad enough. For these patients, therapeutic vaccines can play an essential role in the treatment of cancer. Besides the use for treatment of cancer, therapeutic vaccines could be used in the prevention of cancer recurrence for people with a lot of risk factors for this to happen.” Sebastiaan adds: “Therapeutic vaccines could also be of added value for paediatric cancers, however we still need to gain a lot of knowledge and learn from the response in adults before we can design appropriate vaccines to treat cancer in children.”

The role of therapeutic vaccines within Oncode Accelerator

Sjoerd and Sebastiaan expect that therapeutic vaccines will become an important factor in the treatment of cancer, however always in unity with other therapies. Sebastiaan explains: “To fight tumours, it is likely that combinations between the four therapy types within Oncode Accelerator are needed to achieve the greatest effect, because in many cases one form of therapy may not be able to achieve this alone.” Research showed that therapeutic vaccines can enhance the response to other types of therapies such as immune checkpoint inhibition and for cell transfer therapies. “Therefore, collaboration with other workstreams and platforms is obvious”, Sjoerd states. “One example is for cell and gene therapy as we are involved in a research project that starts with infusing tumour-reactive T-cells to cancer patients followed by a therapeutic vaccine, which we hope will increase the response and the activity of the T-cells that are administered.” Sebastiaan adds: “We notice that there are good contacts between the various workstreams and that the Oncode Accelerator program is speeding up these collaborations. Oncode Accelerator will lead to more of these collaborations, which will hopefully result in better treatment of paediatric and adult cancer in the future .”

The focus on vaccines after COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the attention for vaccines, which has both a positive and negative effect on the view on vaccines, Sjoerd thinks. “A German company was working on a cancer vaccine and used this as a basis to develop their own COVID-19 vaccine in a short time. This currently enables them to perform multiple clinical trials with therapeutic cancer vaccines. In addition, we could learn from the regulatory fast-track applied to the development and application of COVID-19 vaccines. Thereby, you could say that the COVID pandemic has had a positive effect on the development of cancer vaccines. However, the general opinion towards vaccines became much more negative since COVID-19 which can be a downside in new funding for development.” 

Collaboration between academia and industry for cancer vaccine development

“I think the Demonstrator Projects  will form a great starting point for the collaboration between academia and industry”, Sjoerd says. Sebastiaan adds: “I am looking forward to the collaboration between academia and industry. We feel there is huge commitment and goodwill from both sides, so I am confident that these collaborations will flourish soon.” 

Synergy with Oncode Accelerator Workstreams and Platforms

Sjoerd and Sebastiaan are enthusiastic when it comes to collaboration between workstreams and platforms and some of these collaborations have already started. Sebastiaan says: “Our workstream is already working together with the AI platform at different levels. Even though our biological and technical approaches are quite different, we are learning to understand each other’s language, and this has been highly informative. AI is already helping us to make our work more efficient, some steps that we have been doing already for years can now be replaced or optimized by AI. This really speeds up the process.” 

Sjoerd adds: “All innovative platforms within the Oncode Accelerator program will eventually help us in the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines for both paediatric and adult cancer. The phases in which they will play a role will be different. Currently, we are already working with the AI platform, and they are for instance helping us with the identification of new antigens and with the interpretation of data coming from spatial transcriptomic immune profiling techniques. The organoids platform could help us with increasing the amount of tumour material that is available for us to investigate and validate new targets. The well-defined patient cohorts could help us for instance to better interpret the immune profiles by providing real-world data of patients treated with immunotherapy, so that we may be able to predict vaccine effectiveness. Therefore, the innovative platforms show a complementary nature which might get important at distinct levels of development.”

When do you consider Oncode Accelerator as a success? 

Sjoerd and Sebastiaan agree that they consider Oncode Accelerator a success when something beneficial, such as a good working therapeutic cancer vaccine for patients, comes out of the program. Sebastiaan adds: “Oncode Accelerator could also give the Dutch cancer research infrastructure a boost and give it a more prominent role worldwide. It could make the Netherlands the place where innovation and acceleration of cancer drug development is happening.” In that regard, the project is off to a great start with significant momentum built up since the second half of 2023, leading to the hiring of key personnel, installation of state-of-the-art equipment and rapid construction of cutting-edge pipelines and methodologies to develop and test therapeutic cancer vaccines. 

Sjoerd explains: “Oncode Accelerator is an organisation that joins forces and thereby collaborates and innovates for the benefits of cancer patients. If this leads to the development of successful therapeutic cancer vaccines for adult and paediatric patients, it would mean the greatest fulfilment of our efforts to continuously strive to improve and save the lives of patients with cancer.”