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Grant of Immunity

Produced on campus, a new vaccine could marshal the body's defenses in battling cancer  Produced on campus, a new vaccine could marshal the body's defenses in battling cancer   Clad in a Tyvek clean suit and beard guard, third-year PhD student Cameron Bardliving pushes open the door to Cornell's Bioproduction Facility, a suite within a […]

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Produced on campus, a new vaccine could marshal the body's defenses in battling cancer
 

Produced on campus, a new vaccine could marshal the body's defenses in battling cancer

Cameron Bardliving

 

Clad in a Tyvek clean suit and beard guard, third-year PhD student Cameron Bardliving pushes open the door to Cornell's Bioproduction Facility, a suite within a lab on the third floor of Stocking Hall. Built to FDA standards and operated in strict accordance with guidelines governing pharmaceutical research and development, the four-room facility is run by Bardliving and other undergrad, graduate, and postdoctoral scientists under the direction of food science professor Carl Batt. For Bardliving, a Philadelphia native whose own biomedical engineering research investigates the use of lasers to treat cancer, the facility has offered hands-on training in the translation of bench science into commercially available treatments. "It's an opportunity to get experience that no other graduate student has access to," Bardliving says of the facility, the only one of its kind at a U.S. academic institution. "I focus on basic science like traditional graduate students, and the other part of my time I work in the facility, produce vaccines, and learn the logistics of the process."

In August, Batt announced that the facility, which opened in 2002, had produced its first batch of an experimental vaccine for the cancer protein NY-ESO-1. First isolated in 1997 by Weill Cornell molecular pathologist Yao Chen, PhD '86, and his graduate mentor, tumor immunologist Lloyd Old, the molecule has become a focus of the nonprofit Cancer Vaccine Collaborative—a joint enterprise of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the Cancer Research Institute—in its global quest for therapies to strengthen the immune systems of people with cancer. This fall, patients with melanoma and ovarian malignancies began receiving the vaccine as part of Phase I clinical trials at New York University Medical Center and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. While these initial trials are intended only to demonstrate that the vaccine marshals an immune response, Batt harbors more ambitious hopes. "There's an opportunity to see patients potentially go into remission," he says. "No guarantees, and it may never happen—but it could."

Unlike the Gardasil vaccine—which protects against human papillomavirus, the precursor to cervical cancer—those pursued by Batt and his team wouldn't prevent cancer. Instead, they'd prompt the immune system to recognize the strings of proteins that distinguish cells riddled with cancer, augmenting the arsenal of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation deployed by oncologists after diagnosis. The strategy stems from a basic concept: many cancers hijack healthy cells to do their bidding and thus escape the body's defenses. "The challenge," says Batt, "is that your immune system probably does not recognize the protein molecules expressed by the cancer cells, so it doesn't react."

While the work may seem far afield from Batt's research in the Ag college, the former editor of Food Microbiology says the decade he's devoted to developing a novel vaccine production protocol draws on the same theoretical underpinning he's used to produce an enzyme used in food processing to create high-fructose corn syrup. The ability to produce recombinant proteins—molecules spliced together by scientists in the laboratory using strings of DNA that don't occur naturally—underlies both his earlier work and his current partnership with Chen and other scientists at Weill Cornell. "I've always pursued things that are interesting, fundable, and challenging," he says, "and that have the likelihood of some sort of real impact."

The current effort sprang from a meeting Batt attended in 1998 with then-Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and representatives from the Ludwig Institute, which funds laboratory investigations and clinical trials in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Sweden, the U.S., and the U.K. "These guys have resources, they have a vision, and what they're trying to do isn't a half-bad idea," says Batt. "They want to cure cancer." Over the course of several months, he and the Ludwig representatives hammered out a plan for the nonprofit to build the Bioproduction Facility, a clean room adjoining Batt's conventional lab. "Unlike standard grant proposals—where you apply, and six months later you get the money or you don't and that's the end of it—this was a real conversation," he says. "The original partnership papers read like some sort of philosophical document."

Due to the Ludwig Institute support—augmented by grants from the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Cancer Research Institute—Batt, Chen, and collaborator Nasser Altorki, a Weill Cornell cardiothoracic surgeon, have retained intellectual control and property rights for the project. Their work has proceeded at a brisk pace since Chen's initial discovery. "Here we have the opportunity to discover and produce clinical-grade materials tested in clinical trials without restrictions on academic freedom," says Altorki. "If it's successful, it can be released to the pharmaceutical industry while we continue to hold the intellectual property for the materials. It puts us in a whole different boat in terms of economic and academic freedom."

— Sharon Tregaskis '95

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