Cancer Vaccine?

A universal cancer vaccine has been designed to persuade the body’s immune system to attack tumours.

20:35 03 June 2016

An international team of experts has taken a “very positive step” towards creating a universal vaccine against cancer. They taken pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code and put them into tiny nanoparticles of fat and then injected into the bloodstreams of three patients in the advanced stages of the disease.

 

The researchers wrote: “[Such] vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumour antigen [a protein attacked by the immune system] can be encoded by RNA,"

 

“Thus, the nanoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy.”

 

In their study, the patients’ immune system responded to the vaccine by producing T-cells designed to attack cancer. In one patient, a suspected tumour on a lymph node got smaller following the injection of the vaccine. Another patient, whose tumours had been surgically removed, was cancer-free seven months after vaccination.

 

Professor Alan Melcher, of the Institute of Cancer Research, said: “Immunotherapy for cancer is a rapidly evolving and exciting field. This new study, in mice and a small number of patients, shows that an immune response against the antigens within a cancer can be triggered by a new type of cancer vaccine.

 

“Although the research is very interesting, it is still some way away from being of proven benefit to patients.