SKOPOS

The SKOPOS study was designed for patients with malignant mesothelioma of the lung lining (pleura) who were planning to have pemetrexed-cisplatin chemotherapy.

We were investigating whether giving a vaccine called TroVax® with pemetrexed-cisplatin chemotherapy was both safe and potentially beneficial in patients with mesothelioma. This vaccine has been used in combination with chemotherapy in other types of cancer and has been shown to be safe.

Cancer vaccines work by stimulating the person’s immune system to fight the disease, in a similar way to the immune system fighting infection. In laboratory experiments, the vaccine has been shown to stimulate an immune response to a particular protein widely found on mesothelioma cells called 5T4.

In patients with mesothelioma it is hoped that the vaccine will stimulate the immune system to attack mesothelioma cells carrying the 5T4 protein.

Pemetrexed-cisplatin chemotherapy is currently seen as the best treatment for patients with mesothelioma, and this is why we combined it with the vaccine. It was hoped that the combination of the TroVax® vaccine and chemotherapy would be more beneficial than chemotherapy alone.

Pemetrexed-cisplatin was administered to patients into a vein in the arm (intravenously) every three weeks. The TroVax® vaccine was administered as an injection into the shoulder muscle (intramuscularly) three weeks before chemotherapy starts, one week before chemotherapy starts, then every three weeks.

The data is being analysed to evaluate whether TroVax® elicits an immune response in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma treated with pemetrexed-cisplatin.