Universal Cancer Vaccine Gets a Step Closer

                Scientists have inched closer towards creating a universal vaccine against cancer that makes the body’s immune system attack tumours as if they were a virus. An international team of researchers described how they had taken pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles of fat and then injected the mixture into the blood streams of three patients in the advanced stages of the disease. The patients’ immune systems responded by producing “killer” T-cells designed to attack cancer. The vaccine was also found to be effective in fighting “aggressively growing” tumours in mice.

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 nonoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy. The aim of trial was not to test how well the vaccine worked. While the patients’ immune systems seemed to react, there was no evidence that their cancers went away as a result. In one patient, a suspected tumour on a lymph node got smaller. Another patient, whose tumours had been surgically removed, was cancer-free seven months after vaccination. The third patient had eight tumours that had spread from the initial skin cancer into lungs. These tumours remained “clinically stable”.

The vaccine, which used different pieces of RNA, activated dendritic cells that select target for the immune system to attack, the vaccine also produced limited flu-like side effects in contrast to the extreme sickness caused by chemotherapy. Cancer immunotherapy is currently causing significant excitement in the medical community. It is already being used to treat some cancers with a number of patients still in remission more than 10 years after treatment. While traditional cancer treatment for testicular and other form of the disease can lead to a complete cure, lung cancer, melanoma, and some brain and neck cancers have proved difficult to treat.

Immunotherapy for cancer is a rapidly evolving and exciting field. This new study shows that an immune response against the antigens within a cancer can be triggered by a new type of cancer vaccine. There is uncertainty around whether the therapeutic benefit seen in the mice will also apply to humans, and the practical challenge of manufacturing nanoparticles for widespread clinical application.