Titles and Affiliations
President and CEO, Houston Methodist Academic Institute
Director, Houston Methodist Neal Cancer Center
Emily Herrmann Presidential Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research
Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer
Research area
To identify and test potential drug targets for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer.
Impact
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive form of breast cancer, causing more than 150,000 deaths worldwide every year. A type of treatment called immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy, which unleashes the immune system against cancer cells, was recently approved for use in early-stage TNBC. However, if a patient receiving ICI therapy together with chemotherapy before surgery still has residual cancer at the time of surgery, they face a 50 percent chance that the disease will spread throughout the body and become incurable. To improve survival for these patients, Dr. Chang and her team have developed a personalized cancer vaccine called iNeoVAX. The vaccine relies on the same mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines but instead trains the immune system to recognize unique proteins, called antigens, found only on the patient’s cancer cells—regardless of where in the body those cells have spread. The goal is for a patient’s own white blood cells to seek out and destroy TNBC cells throughout the body without harming healthy tissue. A similar personalized vaccine strategy has already shown encouraging results in early clinical trials for pancreatic cancer.
What’s next
Dr. Chang and her colleagues have built an automated platform that can rapidly identify each patient’s unique cancer antigens and use them to design an individualized vaccine—called a tailored neoantigen therapy—built around 20 patient-specific targets. Testing this approach in laboratory models produced encouraging results, leading to a Phase 1/2 clinical trial that is now underway. The trial combines the personalized vaccine with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab in patients with high-risk, early-stage TNBC following standard treatment before surgery. In the coming year, Dr. Chang’s team will analyze blood samples from trial participants to understand how their immune systems respond to the vaccine and how the tumor’s immune environment changes over the course of treatment. This research aims to determine whether this personalized vaccine approach can improve survival for patients with TNBC and to guide the development of future cancer vaccines.
Biography
Jenny C. Chang, MD obtained medical degree from Cambridge University, England and completed fellowship in medical oncology at the Royal Marsden Hospital/Institute for Cancer Research. She was awarded research doctorate from the University of London. Breast cancer has been the focus of her research. She plans to improve the outcome of breast cancer patients by translating scientific discoveries directly into clinical practice and therapeutics. To this end, her most recent work has centered on identifying the mechanisms by which breast cancer stem cells survive chemotherapy, radiation, and hormonal therapy, leading to recurrences, relapses, and metastasis. Her recent work has focused on the intrinsic therapy resistance of cancer stem cells, resulting in several publications and international presentations. In addition, she holds several federal grants evaluating novel biologic agents and patents on new technological advances, especially in the area of high throughput molecular profiling.
