Immune Design announced yesterday the start of a phase 2 immunotherapy trial (CMB305 + Atezolizumab) for patients with synovial sarcoma who express NY-ESO-1 (no need for a specific HLA):
http://ir.immunedesign.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=942208
Has anyone been in the phase 1b trial?
Here is the link to the phase 2 trial:
Results of CMB305 phase 1 trial will be presented at ASCO 2017:
http://abstracts.asco.org/199/AbstView_199_191129.html
8 out of 15 patients with synovial sarcoma had stable disease as best response. Hopefully the combination therapy will be more effective…
Here is the news release from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center regarding this trial:
http://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/releases/2017/06/immune-responses-from-early-study-of-novel-sarcoma-vaccine.html
More explanation on how CMB305 works can be found here:
Dr. Neeta Somaiah talking about CMB305 trial:
More from Dr. Somaiah on CMB305:
Hi Elodie
I’ve been reading up on this trial, it seems very positive what are your thoughts on it?
The Adaptimmune T Cell trials sound great too only thing is it sounds very risky again what are your thoughts?
Other than these 2 trials do you see anything else that’s as promising? Thanks!
The CMB305 trial is not recruiting anymore. The company Immune Design just announced they will have a phase 3 trial for maintenance therapy that should start in the middle of 2018:
http://ir.immunedesign.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1044103
Adaptimmune has been working on its engineered T-cells for a very long time and they had very promising results in the past. They’re definitely worth looking into but their criteria for recruitment are very restrictive: not so many patients have the right HLA to be able to participate.
There’s another company, Takara Bio Inc. which is also trying a similar approach with trials in Japan and Canada:
China has its own study:
And Russia is trying a different approach:
UCLA has a study that is not recruiting yet:
There seems to be a race on who gets the first NY-ESO-1 vaccine approved 
That should be a good thing for patients…
Hi Elodie
Thanks for all the info its very helpful. Absolutely it can only be a good thing to have a lot of competition with associated trials ! Money talks for drug companies - but who cares if it saves the lives of anyone living with this evil disease.
If lung mets develop we will defo have to look at the most promising trials.
With Immune design going into a phase 3 trial - what exactly does that mean? Im still familiarizing myself with how trials proceed to possible eventual approval.
A phase 3 trial compares a new treatment to a placebo (fake drug) or to a conventional therapy then the results are presented to a FDA panel who decides whether the treatment should be approved or not. They usually look for an improvement in overall survival or progression free survival for the group of patients who received the new treatment compare to the group of patients who didn’t.
A phase 1 trial attempts to evaluate what amount of treatment is safe and a phase 2 tries to find out if a treatment has an effect on the disease. Phase 1 trials are usually open to a broad range of tumor types while phase 2 are usually more specific to particular cancers.
Oh that’s great thanks so much for the explanation!