How Far Away Is a Cancer Vaccine?

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(image source: Pixabay)

A cancer vaccine has always remained elusive for medicine and science. Is this situation changing? Is hope rising over the horizon?


The Ovarian Cancer Vaccine


According to the latest news, Oxford University scientists have developed a vaccine for ovarian cancer. This vaccine, OvarianVax, when available for use, will be able to teach the immune cells in our body to detect and attack ovarian cancer cells in the early stages of this disease. Prof. Ahmed Ahmed is the leading scientist behind this research. 


The trial for this vaccine has started. The importance of this development is that when it is ready, this vaccine might wipe out ovarian cancer. Yet, this vaccine is still years away. 



Why Is a Cancer Vaccine Still a Mirage? What is Happening on the Research Front?


Catherine J Wu, a cancer scientist, was awarded the prestigious Sjöberg Prize for her contribution to cancer research in February 2024. She is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.  


She says the greatest challenge in developing a cancer vaccine is to teach our immune cells to selectively attack cancer cells and leave the normal cells unharmed. Cancer cells are not foreign objects entering our body like bacteria or viruses. They are our own cells behaving fatally. They are part of us. Hence, our immune system fails to recognise them as hostile bodies when cancer develops.


Catherine’s research has recognised certain Peptides specific to cancer cells and easily detectable to our immune system. This could be a first step in developing a vaccine. The scientists call these peptides neoantigens. 


These neoantigens pose a greater problem for vaccine development. They vary from one human body to another. Even patients with the same type of cancer have different kinds of neoantigens. Catherine and her team decided to take a different approach to solve this problem. 


Their out-of-the-box thinking led to the revolutionary idea of personalised cancer vaccines. The team tried to develop a vaccine consisting of 20 different peptides. When used in clinical trials, this vaccine cured the participants of melanoma. Trials are ongoing for melanoma, kidney cancer, ovarian cancer, certain types of chronic leukaemia, and glioblastoma. 


Catherine also co-founded a company, Neon Therapeutics, to conduct larger, industry-level clinical trials. Other vaccine companies have also come forward to conduct industry-funded trials. The results from these trials are expected in two years. Hence, two years is the least timeframe we have to wait before we have a vaccine.

   

The ‘Nature’ Review of Cancer Vaccine Research


In 2022, ‘Nature’ published an article reviewing what was happening on the cancer vaccine research front. The article explains how cancer vaccine research evolved by experimenting with different types of antigens to be introduced into the patient’s body to get an effective immune response. These antigens included the whole tumour mass, isolated tumour cells, proteins, peptides, RNA, DNA, etc. The approaches were focused on mostly 4 kinds of outcomes-


  1. In situ- activate tumour sites to generate antigens

  2. Ex vivo- tumour cells containing antigens are injected 

  3. Personalised- introducing cancer-specific and person-specific mutations as antigens

  4. Shared- introducing cancer-specific but non-person-specific mutations as antigens


The research and experiments that go into finding a cancer vaccine are multi-layered and complex because there are so many types of cancers, and each type can have different pathological structures in each individual. The article 'Nature' discusses those complex processes and concludes that a cancer vaccine is just about at the next turn. 


The UK Vaccine Trials


In 2023, the UK government began collaborating with BioNtech, a private company known for its Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, the first among the Covid-19 vaccines. The government enrolled 10,000 people for a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine trial. The NHS has created a Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad to speed up the trials.


These are therapeutic vaccines and not preventive vaccines. They were developed from what scientists learned from the long application and development of immunotherapy drugs for cancer. 


These trials have given new hope for many cancer patients in the UK. All the 10,000 enrolled will get personalised cancer treatment, and the time frame is till 2030.   


From all these developments in the field of cancer vaccine research, we can expect an effective vaccine will emerge by 2030. Most probably, the vaccine, when it arrives, will be customised for each patient.



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