How Personalized Cancer Vaccines Are Advancing Kidney Cancer Care

Personalized cancer vaccines may potentially represent a step forward in guiding the immune system to more precisely target tumors, according to Dr. David A. Braun, a medical oncologist who cares for patients with kidney cancers.

To delve deeper into this topic, Braun sat down for an interview with CURE live from the 2025 Kidney Cancer Research Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. This annual meeting hosts clinicians, researchers, research advocates, scientists, medical oncologists, and others with the goal of enhancing collaboration in the field of kidney cancer research.

Braun is an assistant professor of medicine (Medical Oncology) and a Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman Yale Scholar at Yale School of Medicine, as well as a member of the Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at Yale Cancer Center.

Transcript

Can you explain for patients what a personalized cancer vaccine is?

A lot of the immunotherapies that have been developed for kidney cancers essentially turn on the immune system in some way. In the past, 20 to 25 years ago, high-dose IL-2 really revved up the immune system, helping a limited number of patients significantly, but only a very small number. More recently, these immune checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that have existed for the past 10 years or so in kidney cancer, have truly marked a big sea change for the treatment of kidney cancer.

[Personalized vaccines] essentially take the foot off the brakes of the immune system and help it go faster. However, none of that tells the immune system what to attack. It doesn't say, "Go and find kidney cancer cells and attack them specifically." Those approaches really just turn on the immune system. So, the idea of a personalized cancer vaccine is similar to how we think of infectious disease vaccines.

We're steering the immune system to attack a specific target, and in this case, that target is the cancer itself. We find what is essentially the footprint: what makes that tumor unique? Those are the neoantigens. Then, we design a vaccine that steers the immune system to attack those targets.

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