...from the attached article...
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‘A fantastic discovery’
The idea of a cancer vaccine has been around for decades. The widely used HPV vaccine targets the virus that is linked to an increased risk of cervical, mouth, anal and penile cancer. However, in many cases, cancer vaccines have failed to live up to their promise — largely because the right target hasn’t been found.
“The ability to identify neo-specific tumor antigens has really developed into a large field of cancer research, as it offers the possibility to generate tumor-specific cancer vaccines,” Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren, a professor of immunology at the Karolinska Institutet, said in a video shared by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “This is a fantastic discovery.”
By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient’s unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells. Wu and her team wanted to test this technology in advanced melanoma patients in a trial.
The idea that every patient involved in the trial would get an individualized vaccine was initially hard for the US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates clinical trials, to wrap its collective head around, Wu said. Typically, the FDA would require the vaccines to be tested first in animal experiments.
Wu and her team made their case: “That room was packed. It was the first (trial) of its kind, and there were people from many different offices. Our argument was, ‘This is personalized, whatever we do in an animal doesn’t really match the human — so why even go that route?’”
Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system’s cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided “proof of principle” that a vaccine can be targeted to a person’s specific tumor, Lendahl said.
A follow-up by Wu’s team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control.
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Good news indeed...
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/20/health/cancer-vaccines-catherine-wu-scn/index.html