T-cell based immunotherapies

[Harvey]

Hello Al,

it has come to my attention the tests for mhc-I and mhc-II are made very seldom.

On the other hand, as I understood, without the expression of mhc - T-Cell immunotherapies don’t work (dc-vaccines, etc.)

can you please comment.

its unbelievable for me that such an important topic isn’t discussed broadly when deciding whether to use T-Cell approaches or not.

thanks

[edysinger]

I agree with you because it would be great information to have as factors on how well immunotherpies work and other therapies.

[musella]

MHC is "major histocompatibility complex". Type 1 is found on most cells in the body, type 2 is only on the immune cells. The targets of immunotherapy sometimes very highly rely on the specific type of MHC. for example, the vaccine ICT-107 only worked well in HLA a1+ and HLA A2+ patients. IF they knew that before the big trial, and then only allowed these patient in, the trial would have been a success.. but they didn't and the median survivals of all types did not change so if failed and I think went out of business. My point: they should be testing this on every patient in ever immunotherapy trial.

[Harvey]

But Caris Foundation isn’t testing this as well! That doesn’t make sense at all.

[musella]

As I understand it, these tests are Blood test and caris does not get blood - just tumor tissue.

[Harvey]

Nope, those are tumor tissue tests as well - it’s done via staining.

[musella]

I asked my friend Dr Okada - one of the foremost brain tumor vaccine people in the world. He said:
The MHC type does not affect all vaccines just some of them, The test is usually done on peripheral blood, not on the tumor. It can be done on the tumor. The MHC type of the tumor is always the same as the MHC type of the blood, except some tumors downregulate the expression of MHCs so although of the same type, there is less expression on the tumor and it is easier to test the blod. He usually tests his patients via the blood test only when he is anticipating using a vaccine that is known to be HMHC restricted.