Safety/Efficacy of a Vaccine Prepared From Dendritic Cells Combined With Tumor Cells to Treat Advanced Kidney Cancer

Approximately 30,000 new cases of kidney cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. in 2002, with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) being the most commonly diagnosed type. For patients with locally advanced or metastatic disease, the treatment options are extremely limited and additional options are warranted. Although RCC is generally considered resistant to chemotherapy, spontaneous regressions in patients with metastatic disease have led to research involving immune-mediated therapeutic approaches. Clinical responses have been observed and additional immune-modulating therapeutics are being studied. Several such approaches have used dendritic cells (DCs), which are known to be potent antigen presenting cells. An antigen is a protein that, when shown to the immune system in the right way, can trigger the cells of the immune system to recognize, remember and eliminate other cells that also display that specific antigen. The cancerous cells in tumors present antigens in such a way that the body's immune system often fails to recognize and eliminate them. It is theorized that when DCs are fused to tumor cells the resulting fused cells will be capable of presenting tumor antigens in an enhanced manner, thus allowing the body's immune system to recognize the tumor antigens on the cancer itself. If this occurs, the patient's immune system may be specifically stimulated, producing a clinically meaningful immune response against the tumor. In this study DCs produced from healthy volunteer donors (allogeneic DCs) will be fused to the patient's own tumor cells (autologous tumor cells), using an electrical current. The fused dendritic/tumor cells will be returned to the patient in a series of vaccines, six weeks apart. The purpose of this trial is to determine whether fusing autologous tumor with allogeneic DCs will, with limited associated toxicity, present tumor antigen in such a way as to stimulate an immune response and also show evidence of tumor response.