Cancer Vaccine

We're getting to one of those times of the year when there seems to be a lot of interesting research and other information being published and presented about lymphoma, so I'll probably devote the next few posts to some of them.

I saw an interesting article about new developments in creating a cancer vaccine. It's called "Implants Mimic Infection to Rally Immune System Against Tumors." It's not about lymphoma, but it's a very interesting new approach to vaccines that could probably be used on lymphoma some day.

When I saw the lymphoma specialist at Yale a year ago, he mentioned that lymphoma vaccines were being developed, and I remembered being blown away by the whole concept (maybe because he seemed so excited about it). Within the last year, the preliminary clinical trial results for one study of the vaccines have been less than exciting, and the vaccine that they tried seemed to work OK for some people, but not broadly enough for people to get really hopeful about it. That was my reading of the numbers, anyway, and I've seen almost nothing about this vaccine trial since that report came out, which has been a little disappointing.

But the article above presents a different approach to using a vaccine. The approach that has already been tried involved some real personalization -- getting a sample of the individual patient's cancer cells and creating the vaccine tailored specifically to him or her.

This new appraoch, as you may read, involves implanting a small plastic disk that is "impregnated with tumor-specific antigens" and implanted under the skin. The theory is that since the immune system attacks outsiders, it ignores cancer cells, because they are created by the body -- they're not seeen as an "outside threat." The disks allow immune cells to enter them, where they pick up antigens that are specific to the tumor cells -- the antigens are almost like little messages that say "Attack anything that looks like this -- it's an outsider." The immune cells go to the lymph nodes and deliver the messages to T-cells (the cells that are responsible for attacking bad things in the body, like, say, viruses). The hope is that the T cells will then learn to attack the cancer cell the way it would attack a virus it had already come into contact with wenever the see it, creating a kind of immunity for the patient.

So this is still personalization like the previous vaccines, but the plastic disk seems to be the great innovation, since immune cellls have no choice but to pass through and pick up the message. In tests on mice, it helped 90% of them cure an aggressive type of melanoma.

More hope, more new stuff to keep track of for the next few years.