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QF Focus Magazine
Hospital Quirónsalud Torrevieja creates vaccines against cancer The hospital has set up a ‘Clean Room’ to make specific immunotherapy treatments for oncology patients.
Torrevieja, June 9 2016. Hospital Quirónsalud Torrevieja has set up a Clean Room (Sala Blanca, in Spanish) designed to meet GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) quality criteria, for the elaboration of advanced therapy medications, such as vaccines with dendritic cells. Hospital Quirónsalud Torrevieja's Oncology Platform medical team, lead by doctor Antonio Brugarolas, has started production of dendritic cells obtained from the blood of patients suffering from advanced neoplasms, 'such as metastatic prostate cancer, which consistently show that it's possible to obtain a specific immune reaction against the tumour'. In addition to working with this cancer, the Clean Room's roadmap includes plans to get involved in manufacturing vaccines for treating patients with melanoma and breast cancer.
Doctors Manuel Sureda and Belén Valenzuela, who together head the Clean Room's immunotherapy programme, explain that, “From the clinical perspective, it has been shown that these cancer vaccines are a safe therapeutic strategy, which is well tolerated, and does not generate an autoimmune response”.
According to doctor Belén Valenzuela, “Immunotherapy is an oncological treatment option that uses the immune system to fight cancer”. It seeks therapeutic benefit through the mobilisation of the immune system. Dendritic cells are the ones that have the most potent antigens we know of, far greater than macrophages or B-lymphocytes. These cells are capable of presenting tumour-specific peptides to cytotoxic T lymphocytes and, this way, promote their activation and proliferation so they recognise and eliminate tumour cells that express these peptides. In addition to their essential role in the activation of T-lymphocytes, these cells directly interact with other types in the tumour microenvironment and promote an in vivo anti-tumour response.
Elaboration Process Vaccine elaboration from dendritic cells for use in prostate cancer treatment includes several steps, all of which take place within the Clean Room. Using the patient’s blood, cells with only one nucleus (mononuclear), which are lymphocytes and monocytes, are selected. Then, a culture of dendritic cells is obtained through the incubation of these mononuclear cells with different stimulating molecules. During the final phases, the dendritic cells are incubated with prostatic acid phosphatase in order to obtain specific dendritic cells for this protein which, finally, will be infused back into the patient’s own bloodstream. This vaccine causes the in vivo activation and proliferation of T lymphocytes that are specific effectors of the tumour, which will recognise and eliminate the cancer cells expressing prostatic acid phosphatase.
The ‘Clean Room’ and Immunotherapy to Fight Cancer The new space is a room that has been especially designed and built to obtain minimal or null levels of contamination, where so-called ‘advanced therapy medications’ can be elaborated. The environmental parameters inside this room are strictly controlled: particles in the air, temperature, airflow, air pressure, light level, etc. The workers who enter the room wear sterile suits that include caps, facemasks, work overalls, gloves and overshoes, in order to avoid contaminating the room.
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