GD3-L-KLH vaccine elicits antibody response in melanoma patients.

2004 OCT 6 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Sequential immunization of melanoma patients with GD3 ganglioside vaccine and anti-idiotypic monoclonal antibody that mimics GD3 ganglioside elicited an antibody response that did not correlate with patient survival.

"GD3 ganglioside is an attractive target for immunotherapy of melanoma because it is abundantly expressed on all melanomas but not expressed on most normal tissues. Although GD3 has proven to be one of the least immunogenic gangliosides, our recent studies showed that anti-GD3 antibodies can be induced in patients immunized either with GD3-lactone-KLH (GD3-L-KLH) plus QS-21 adjuvant or with BEC2 anti-idiotypic monoclonal antibody vaccine, which mimics GD3, plus bacillus Calmette-Guerin. We compared the immunogenicity of these two vaccines and tested whether one vaccine could prime an antibody response to the other," investigators in the United States report.

"This is the first clinical trial immunizing patients with both antigen and anti-idiotypic monoclonal antibody vaccine," said Paul B. Chapman and colleagues at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "Twenty-four melanoma patients were randomized to be immunized with either BEC2 followed by GD3-L-KLH or in the opposite order. Our prior study suggested that a 25-mcg dose of BEC2 was more immunogenic than our standard dose of 2.5 mg and therefore was used in this trial. Overall, 10 of 24 patients (42%) developed anti-GD3 antibodies detectable by ELISA, five in each cohort. All antibody ...