In a new study from Mount Sinai, researchers showed an experimental vaccine that uses genetics to teach a person’s immune system how to precisely target cancer has proven safe and feasible in early clinical trials.
Cancer tends to recur because even the most thorough treatments leave microscopic cancer cells behind that can’t be seen in imaging tests.
Cancer research has been looking at ways to use the immune system to find and kill these cells, but the side effects of immunotherapy can be terrible as a revved-up immune system does damage to normal tissues as well as cancer cells.
With this latest approach, researchers performed in-depth genetic analysis of a person’s tumor as well as their healthy tissue.
They then used a computer to look for specific abnormal proteins that occurred only in the person’s cancer cells.
The team then creates a vaccine from what they’ve learned about the patient and his/her tumor. They make synthetic proteins in the lab that look like the proteins from the tumor, and then we vaccinate the patients with those.
This vaccine’s goal is to teach the patient’s immune system to recognize cancer’s foreign proteins, so the immune system can differentiate between cancer and normal tissue.
In the study, 13 cancer patients received a series of 10 custom-designed vaccinations over the course of six months. They suffered from a variety of different cancers—multiple myeloma and cancers of the breast, bladder, lung and neck.
The team found a really robust anti-cancer response from the immune system after the treatment.
The team says everyone who comes see me in the cancer center, their cancer is completely different from everyone sitting around them and their immune system is completely different from everyone sitting around them.
The new vaccine is a very promising approach that could attack cancer without the serious side effects that come from current cancer therapies, researchers say.
The next steps will be looking at its efficacy, in terms of how robust it is in actually shrinking a tumor or causing a clinical response.
If you care about cancer, please read studies about new finding could help prevent colon cancer and findings of new treatment for pancreatic cancer.
For more information about cancer prevention and treatment, please see recent studies about common Mexican plant may stop cancer growth and results showing that common drugs for inflammation, diabetes, alcoholism may help kill cancer.
The study was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) annual meeting. One author of the study is Dr. Thomas Marron.
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