Incorporating Cancer Vaccines with Chemotherapy for the Treatment of Osteosarcoma

Background

The most exciting advances in cancer treatment over the last few years have been with immune-based therapies. We have witnessed great successes for adult patients in treating skin, kidney, and lung cancer with antibodies that allow the immune system to be activated against a patient's cancer. Relapsed leukemia is being treated using genetically engineered immune cells that attack the leukemia cells.

Our lab's goal is to expand uses of immune therapies to pediatric cancers -- specifically bone tumors like osteosarcoma. As chemotherapy is the mainstay of therapy for osteosarcoma, the quickest route to a clinical trial would be immune therapies that would be incorporated into traditional chemotherapy regimens with the goal of improving their effectiveness. However, as chemotherapy can be toxic to immune cells, we must be thoughtful to determine the proper timing and type of immune therapy given.

Project Goal

This project will model in mice the combination of traditional chemotherapy with a cancer vaccine to determine the impact on the growth of an osteosarcoma tumor. We will test the effect of the chemotherapy drugs used for the treatment of osteosarcoma (doxorubicin, cisplatin, and methotrexate) on the ability to generate effective anti-tumor immune responses. We will also determine how the immune cells found in a tumor change with chemotherapy treatment. This data will be crucial to understand how future clinical trials combining chemotherapy and immune therapy might be designed.