It's innovative, but it's not like I had the idea of the century when I woke up one morning. We would like to have a vaccine which addresses this genetic heterogeneity and could work in Europe, Japan or the US, where the people are genetically very different. So that's why, for example, when you have to get a new organ, you have to find somebody who is compatible with you. Also, we are addressing the genetic heterogeneity of human beings. We're trying to have antigens which can (prompt the immune system to) target a lot of different cells in the tumour - not all the tumour cells express the same antigen. We end up with a chimeric protein where we have pieces assembled that keep the advantages that we will need to achieve a good immune response. So we could find some protein sequence which provides the danger signal and fuse it to the same protein. The other aspect is that you need to have the so-called ‘danger signal’ in order to get the immune system activated. To improve that I have added a cell-penetrating peptide (to deliver) the antigens. To achieve that, the protein has to be delivered in a certain way. For a cancer vaccine you want to have cytotoxic T-cells (which kill cancer cells) and not necessarily antibodies. But proteins do not produce the immune response that you want.
Vaccines using proteins are easier to manufacture than viruses. How does your vaccine help the immune system to recognise the cancer?Įach type of vaccine platform has advantages and disadvantages. But the immune cells are not fully activated, so you need to give them a little help. Your immune system spontaneously, or with some stimulation, can recognise the cancer cells as a threat and attack them. This drug, called Coley’s toxins, was on the market until after the Second World War (when changes in FDA regulations required clinical trials for the drug to be approved for use). He developed a cocktail of bacteria that he administered to patients to treat the cancer, and sometimes there were quite impressive results. How would a cancer vaccine work?Īround 1891, a surgeon called Dr Coley noticed that when patients have cancer and also a bacterial infection at the same time, the tumour was shrinking. Most people are familiar with the idea of vaccinating against infectious diseases, but not against cancer. Vaccines are getting a lot of public attention at the moment in the battle against Covid-19. This is where vaccines could soon help us to target some of the most hard-to-treat cancers, says Dr Derouazi, whose company is currently running trials of a therapeutic vaccine in people with colorectal cancer. To work more broadly, we must also train the immune system to recognise the cancer. These drugs can have remarkable results in a minority of cases, leading to long-lasting remission. To unleash our immune system we have to tackle both of these tricks.Ī revolution in immunology over the past decade led to the creation of immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors that reawaken the immune system.
However, many cancers have tricks that allow them to hide from the immune system and suppress our immune defences. Arming our immune system to fight cancer has been a long-standing dream for scientists and doctors.
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