Dr. Patrick Ott speaks with Dr. Kerri Purdy about the Herculean effort currently underway to design a vaccine against melanoma. Developing a vaccine for melanoma is particularly challenging because it needs to be different for every person.

Dr. Ott discusses:

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• How personalized neopeptide antigen vaccines are made specifically for each individual patient.
  
• The challenge they face implementing this in the clinic because in metastatic melanoma it can take 2-3 months to sequence the specific tumour and make the vaccine
  
• Cancer patients who have more neoantigens have better T-cell responses
  
• Newer cancer vaccines using neoantigens to drive T-cells into the tumour and trigger an immune response are more effective than those designed two decades ago
  
• We now want to use the vaccines in a metastatic setting with improved delivery of the vaccine and use of adjuvants
  
• We can use molecular tools to show that vaccines can drive T-cells into the tumour.
  

Dr. Ott is Clinical Director of the Melanoma Center and the Center for Immuno-Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He is a physician and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.