Titles and Affiliations
Director, Abramson Cancer Center
John H. Glick, MD Abramson Cancer Center’s Professor
Vice Dean, Cancer Programs, Perelman School of Medicine
Vice President, Cancer Programs, University of Pennsylvania Health System
Research area
Developing a novel immunotherapy to prevent breast cancer in BRCA mutation carriers.
Impact
Activating the immune system to fight cancer is one of the most promising approaches for treating patients with cancer. While immunotherapy drugs have produced exciting results in some cancers including some patients with breast cancer, relatively few patients have benefitted from it thus far. Dr. Vonderheide has considerable expertise in immune system function and gene therapy. With his team, he is leveraging this knowledge to develop new approaches to prevent breast cancer and recurrence in individuals who are at high risk, including those carrying BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations.
Progress Thus Far
Dr. Vonderheide has developed a DNA-based vaccine specific for the human telomerase catalytic domain (hTERT), a protein which is overexpressed in more than 95 percent of breast cancers. His team is testing this DNA immunotherapy for breast cancer prevention or recurrence. So far, they have tested the vaccine in more than 100 patients and are now completing a phase 1 trial of healthy individuals with inherited BRCA1/BRCA2 mutations (but without cancer). This is the first prevention vaccine tested in this high-risk population.
What’s Next
Dr. Vonderheide’s team will finish treatment and safety observations in the BRCA1/BRCA2 germline mutation carriers enrolled in the DNA clinical trial. Using samples obtained from each trial participant before and after treatment, they will examine their immune response. In other studies, his team will work to advance an RNA version of the approach, including various molecular enhancers of the immune response. They aim to leverage the knowledge they gain from these important clinical and laboratory studies to develop novel cancer prevention and interception strategies.
Biography
Robert H. Vonderheide, MD, D.Phil. received his DPhil from Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar) and MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed training in internal medicine and medical oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Dr. Vonderheide is a distinguished scientist and board-certified medical oncologist who has deciphered mechanisms of cancer immune surveillance and developed novel cancer therapeutics. He is well-recognized for driving the development of agonist CD40 antibodies, now in later stage clinical trials, as potential immune therapy of cancer. Dr. Vonderheide merges his clinical investigations with rigorous studies in genetically engineered mouse models or other laboratory systems. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Vonderheide has been continuously funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), serves on nine scientific boards for other cancer centers and the NCI Board of Scientific Advisers. His high-impact findings have been published in Nature, Science, Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine.
“If not for BCRF, we would not have advanced our goal of intercepting and preventing breast cancer in healthy, at-risk individuals…”
