Unlike most vaccines, including the HPV vaccine meant to prevent cervical cancer, this is not prophylactic, it's not meant to prevent cancer. Rather, it's a therapy to get rid of cancer once you have it by targeting your immune system towards cancer cells.<p>Many (most?) cancers have some degree of immune system involvement. In early stages of cancer, the immune system often attacks tumor cells. In later stages of cancer, tumor cells can evolve the behavior of secreting signals to attract the type of immune cells that can support the tumor by doing things such as promoting blood vessel growth. We know a <i>lot</i> about the immune system, and I would venture that we understand more of the immune system's complexity than any other system in the body, but we still don't know all the dynamics. For example, we know the development pathways from blood stem cell to differentiated immune cells, but not all the key factors, or how to push it just this way or that.<p>This is not the first cancer vaccine, but it is an interesting new way to attempt to reprogram the immune system.
Funny that this comes out the day after GlaxoSmithKline's melanoma vaccine failed in phase III.[0]<p>Some science background on how these work. The idea is that some cancer types express specific proteins that can theoretically be targeted by your immune system, similar to how your immune system can target proteins from the Influenza virus. The goal of these vaccines is to make your immune system recognize this protein (called an antigen) and mount an immune response to kill all the cancer cells expressing the antigen (usually unique to tumour cells).<p>The problem is in inducing the immune response, usually these antigens don't mount strong immune responses so the attack is too slow relative to the rate that cancer cells divide and spread. Sometimes you also end up stimulating the wrong immune response, as the human immune response is quite complicated. In fact, tumors naturally stimulate inflammation and angiogenesis (immune responses) to spread! To make matters worse, some tumours even suppress the capability of immune cells to fight in the local area, rendering this vaccine useless.<p>The normal operating procedure for these vaccines is to remove some immune cells from the patient, cause them to become sensitive to a specific antigen, mix them with an immune system stimulant and inject them back into the patient. The ultimate goal of all of these methods is to improve the immunogenicity (ability of the vaccine to elicit an immune response) of vaccines, these guys are not making a new vaccine. Rather, this is just a new delivery method.<p>A very promising drug called Stimuvax by Merck which used liposomes (and had 100% regression in mice vs 50% in this study) to increase immunogenicity failed as well[1] so this should be taken with great caution, researches were overly optimistic on previous vaccines such as Stimuvax. Although the idea for the Harvard/Dana-Farber study is incredibly novel.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.gsk.com/media/press-releases/2013/the-investigational-mage-a3-antigen-specific-cancer-immunotherap.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gsk.com/media/press-releases/2013/the-investigati...</a>
[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimuvax" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimuvax</a>
This is only for one form of skin cancer.<p>I think the word cancer really is used to broadly and most people believe that cancer = cancer when in fact cancers vary widely. Sarcoma cancer is so different than say Leukemia that one trial that help one has zero impact on the other.<p>In cancer it is the scientific name that is so important to understand what is happening. I ask people what kind of cancer they have and they say I don't know its cancer my doctor knows and I just cry on the inside.
"The goal of the Phase I study, which is expected to conclude in 2015, is to assess the safety of the vaccine in humans."<p>This is a fairly written press release, which besides the hopeful language common to any university press release about science research[1] manages to mention how preliminary this research still is. Many treatments that show promise in animal models do not ultimately have clinical usefulness for human patients. It would be wonderful if this approach to treating cancer is shown to be safe for human beings, which is the issue explored in a phase I clinical trial. Then further research will have to explore whether or not this approach is effective in human patients--which is not a sure thing even if it is effective in mice. After that, doctors will have to evaluate the treatment's overall safety and effectiveness compared to all other treatments available by the unknown future date when some new treatment reaches clinical use. There will also be the issue, of course, that two kinds of treatment may have similar safety and effectiveness profiles but differ radically in cost.<p>All in all, good news at the first step, with a lot more to be found out before we know whether this will help us dodge the bullet of cancer in our own lifetimes.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174" rel="nofollow">http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174</a>
It looks like the more interesting part of this article is the accelerated process to move from early research to human trials. We have lots of ways of curing cancer in mice that never panned out in humans, but we have a better chance of finding solutions that work if we can remove some of the impediments to moving forward with trials. Faster progress is dependent on decreasing the time each iteration takes.
<i>50 percent of mice treated with two doses of the vaccine...showed complete tumor regression.</i><p>I would have thought clinical trials would require a higher success rate... is it only because it's the last resort and patients would otherwise die anyways?
*<p>1 point by ThomPete 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete<p>As someone with more than a thousand moles and already one melanoma i am interested in knowing how to participate in such a thing.
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There already is a cancer vaccine. It's called "Don't eat industrialized crap".<p>Cancer is virtually non-existent in tradition non-industrial tribes and societies. And yes many in those culture do grow just about as old as we do.