Cancer Vaccines

 I just got my print issue of CURE magazine, and the cover story is about cancer vaccines. 

(You might have seen CURE in an oncologist's office. It's aimed at patients, published by the same folks who do the OncLive website for oncologists. You can get your own subscription for free.)

Interestingly, the website Breaking Cancer News, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, also had a series of stories on cancer vaccines recently. 

I've always found the idea of a cancer vaccine kind of fascinating, for one good reason. Sixteen years ago, soon after I was diagnosed, I went to a lymphoma specialist for a second opinion, and he talked about some of the new treatments that were being developed. It was not an entirely happy appointment, and the whole experience actually put me into a deep depression for a couple of weeks. But he also said some other things tat have stayed with me since then.

And one of those things was that he told me "Anything you read about online is already out of date," meaning that by the time a new treatment is being written about, it's already been in development for a while, and by the time results are published in a medical journal, the research has probably already been presented at a major conference. It was his way of saying there were lots of great things happening in Follicular Lymphoma research. That was the start of my fascination with lymphoma research.

Another of the things I remember was his excitement about one particular treatment -- a possible vaccine for FL. It unfortunately didn't work out, which is true about every other attempt at a cancer vaccine. (Here's some nostalgia for you -- a Lympho Bob post from 10 years ago talking about a failed vaccine, and another from a year before that on why cancer vaccines had been unsuccessful up to that point.) 

Interestingly, some of this is covered in the CURE article (which is in the print edition this week, but which appeared in CURE Today, the online edition of the magazine, about a month ago).

The biggest difference between the older, failed attempts at a vaccine, and the newer ones that CURE calls "a marvel," is the approach. Newer vaccines (which are currently in clinical trials) use mRNA technology -- the same platform that several Covid vaccines were built on. 

In fact, the reason the Covid vaccines were able to be rolled out so soon (though it didn't feel soon at the time) was because the technology had been developed years before in attempts to create a cancer vaccine. With the basic technology in place, the Covid researchers had to kind of swap some parts, and that let them develop the vaccine.

You might remember how the mRNA vaccine works (being the science nerds you probably are). Thin back to high school biology class. DNA is the blueprint for everything in our bodies (I'm way oversimplifying here). The structure of DNA is a double helix -- a kind of corkscrew. To duplicate itself, DNA sort of unzips, and RNA comes in and attaches to the open zipper and makes a copy of it. The mRNA that is used in vaccines does the same thing. It can be programmed to create a protein that produces an immune response in the body, one that will be able to work against cancer cells.

The CURE article does  a better job than I do of describing this. So does this video from Nature, the prestigious science journal.

Watch that video -- it gets into a few other approaches to cancer vaccines besides the mRNA approach. There are still some barriers to having all of this actually work.

That said, there seems to be enough interest in the last few months, from a bunch of different sources, to make it worth keeping an eye on. I still have good memories of the hopefulness that I felt when that lymphoma specialist mentioned them to me so many years ago.