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. |
