Malcolm Adams

OBJECTIVES: To consider the role of platinum and the relative merits of single agent and combination chemotherapy in the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer. DESIGN: Formal quantitative overview using updated individual patient data from all available randomised trials (published and unpublished). SUBJECTS: 8139 patients (6408 deaths) included in 45 different trials. RESULTS: No firm conclusions could be reached. Nevertheless, the results suggest that in terms of survival immediate platinum based treatment was better than non-platinum regimens (overall relative risk 0.93; 95% confidence interval 0.83 to 1.05); platinum in combination was better than single agent platinum when used in the same dose (overall relative risk 0.85; 0.72 to 1.00); and cisplatin and carboplatin were equally effective (overall relative risk 1.05; 0.94 to 1.18). CONCLUSIONS: In the past, randomised clinical trials of chemotherapy in advanced ovarian cancer have been much too small to detect the degree of benefit which this overview suggests is realistic for currently available chemotherapeutic regimens. Hence a new trial comparing cisplatin, doxorubicin, and cyclophosphamide (CAP) with carboplatin has been launched and plans to accrue 2000 patients.

Ideal vaccines should be stable, safe, molecularly defined, and out-of-shelf reagents efficient at triggering effector and memory Ag-specific T cell-based immune responses. Dendritic cell-derived exosomes could be considered as novel peptide-based vaccines because exosomes harbor a discrete set of proteins, bear functional MHC class I and II molecules that can be loaded with synthetic peptides of choice, and are stable reagents that were safely used in pioneering phase I studies. However, we showed in part I that exosomes are efficient to promote primary MHC class I-restricted effector CD8(+) T cell responses only when transferred onto mature DC in vivo. In this work, we bring evidence that among the clinically available reagents, Toll-like receptor 3 and 9 ligands are elective adjuvants capable of triggering efficient MHC-restricted CD8(+) T cell responses when combined to exosomes. Exosome immunogenicity across species allowed to verify the efficacy of good manufactory procedures-manufactured human exosomes admixed with CpG oligonucleotides in prophylactic and therapeutic settings of melanoma in HLA-A2 transgenic mice. CpG adjuvants appear to be ideal adjuvants for exosome-based cancer vaccines.