Preclinical services for cancer vaccines development
Many cancer platforms are evaluating vaccines as therapeutic tools, such as standard vaccines like peptides, proteins or messenger RNAs but also more sophisticated approaches like activated APCs, recombinant viruses or bacteria, killed tumor cells, among others. There is also a large spectrum of potential cancer vaccine targets, from transverse tumor associated antigens to patient-specific neoantigen signatures. The preclinical evaluation of these types of therapies requires both immune effector cells and tumor targets. Until now, rodent models used in the preclinical evaluation of cancer vaccines were mostly exclusively syngeneic.
Oncodesign Services focuses on preclinical proof of concept studies of therapeutic cancer vaccines and the use of refined models.
How Oncodesign Services can support your cancer vaccine therapies?
Vaccines are the greatest triumph to prevent and eventually cure viral and bacterial diseases. They provide some advantages over standard treatment:
- They have long-lived antitumor effects (memory T-lymphocytes)
- They are potentialy able to cure distant tumors like metastasis
- They have rare side effects, with mostly local reactions and minimal systemic toxicity
In this contexte, Oncodesign Services offers huge capabilities and extensive experience in preclinical cancer research and vaccination, with internal knowledge issued from hundreds of studies since more than 25 years.
We provide integrated solutions from in vitro to in vivo experiments, including dosing and imaging capabilities enabling us to provide both PK and PD evaluation.
Models and Cancer vaccines
The preclinical development of cancer vaccine involves evaluating its safety, efficacy, and immune response. Tested vaccines can be combined with the following treatment modalities:
- Chemotherapy (in particular ICD agents, i.e. immune Cell Death inducers)
- Radiotherapy
- Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors
- Any NCE known to activate the immune system or to decrease the quantity or activity of immune-suppressive cells (Tregs, MDSC, …)
At Oncodesign Services, examples of syngeneic model for which the TAA (Tumor Associated Antigen) is known to be expressed are:
Immunological readouts
The following tools are available to characterize the immune responses elicited by the cancer vaccine and/or decipher the mechanism of action of the tested items:
- Cytokine expression (Luminex technology)
- Humoral responses analyses
- ELISpot assay
- Ex vivo cytotoxic activity (CTL assay)
- Immunohistochemistry
- Flow cytometry used for various analyses and from different fluids/organs
- Evaluation of the frequencies of antigen specific CD8+ T cells
- Quantitative analyses of immune populations infiltrating the tumor (CD4+, CD8+ T cells, Treg, MDSC, Macrophages, DC, …)
- Functional characterizations of immune populations (Teff, M1, M2, M-MDSC, G-MDSC, …)
- …
