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This week, I address pushback I received on my Novartis-MorphoSys column. But first, a preview of the expected readout from Gritstone Bio’s neoantigen cancer vaccine study.

A looming test for neoantigen cancer vaccines

Before the end of the quarter, Gritstone Bio will release preliminary results from a randomized, Phase 2 clinical trial investigating a personalized therapeutic cancer vaccine in microsatellite-stable colon cancer, a type of “immunologically cold” tumor that is resistant to immunotherapies like PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors.

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The Gritstone vaccine is designed to train a patient’s own T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells by targeting mutated cancer proteins, called neoantigens, that are unique to a patient’s own tumor. It’s a relatively new approach for cancer vaccines — made possible by powerful and relatively inexpensive genomic sequencing of tumors – that is intended to overcome all the previous failures in the field. Gritstone’s effort is also similar to one being used by Moderna and Merck that has reported encouraging results in melanoma — and is now being investigated in a Phase 3 study.

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