Vaccination With Tetanus and KLH to Assess Immune Responses.
Status:
Terminated
Trial end date:
2012-03-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
The purpose of this study is to learn how the immune system works in response to vaccines. We
will give the vaccines to subjects who have cancer but have not had treatment, and to
patients who have had chemotherapy or stem cell transplant. Some patients will get vaccines
while they are on treatments which boost the immune system (like the immune stimulating drug
interleukin-2 or IL-2). Although we have safely treated many patients with immune boosting
drugs, we do not yet know if they improve the body's immune system to respond better to a
vaccine. Some healthy volunteers will also be given the vaccines in order to serve as control
subjects to get a good measure of the normal immune response. We will compare the patients
and the healthy volunteers to study how their immune systems respond to the vaccines.
There are several different types of white cells in the blood. We are interested in immune
cells in the blood called T-cells. These T-cells detect foreign substances in the body (like
viruses and cancer cells). We are trying to learn more about how the body fights these
foreign substances. Our goal is to develop cancer vaccines which would teach T-cells to
detect and kill cancer cells better. We know that in healthy people the immune system
effectively protects against recurrent virus infection. For example, that is why people only
get "mono" (mononucleosis) once under normal circumstances. When the body is infected with
the "mono" virus, the immune system remembers and prevents further infection. We are trying
to use the immune system to prevent cancer relapse. To test this, we will give two vaccines
which have been used to measure these immune responses. Blood samples will be studied from
cancer patients and will be compared to similar samples from normal subjects.