A Cancer Vaccine? Small Study Shows Enough Promise To Warrant More Research

“What we call a response rate is greater than 50% shrinkage, so there was 50% shrinkage in three,” says Dr. Jennifer Amengual, lymphoma expert at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center. “But seven patients had their disease get smaller, and that lasted for a long time. So even the one who had 18% reduction, but they didn't have any growth for 421 days. Their disease became stable, and they didn't have their disease grow for over a year.”

“Is it something that would get approval?” Dr. Amerngual asks. “No. Not in this setting with just eleven patients. But it's something to build on. If you can get a robust, well tolerate treatment, thats a big victory. Their patients had very mild symptoms, flu like symptoms, but very mild, which means it could maybe be brought to a larger patient population.”

It’s important to know that this study only included eleven people, so it isn’t like the vaccine has been tried on a lot of people, and doctors would have to do a huge amount of research before it ever became an available treatment. But the initial findings did offer some hope, and seem to warrant more research.

Unlike the flu vaccine, this vaccine is for people who have already been diagnosed with cancer. But it’s called a vaccine because it uses the body’s own immune system to fight the disease by “training” it to recognize and attack the tumors cells, much like flu shots train the body to recognize and attack flu cells.

During the study, researchers injected a tumor with a drug that brings immune system cells to the tumor. Then, they treated the tumor with a low dose of radiation. This step is crucial to the study, because the radiation kills a few tumor cells, which means that some of the tumor cell “antigens,” or proteins that the immune system needs to engage with in order to stop the tumor from growing. Using radiation, researchers produced the tumor proteins that the immune system can be trained to attack.

Then researchers injected it with a drug that activates the newly recruited immune cells. Through these steps, researchers created active immune cells that were activated, trained to attack the cancer, and that could travel through the body to kill tumors wherever the immune cells encountered them.

Before they tested the treatment on humans, researchers used mice for preliminary data. “What they found, which was pretty interesting, was that they had better effect in mice that had a lot of disease than in those who had just a little disease,” says Dr. Amengual.

"It's really promising, and the fact you get not only responses in treated areas, but areas outside the field [of treatment with radiation] is really significant," Dr. Silvia Formenti, chairwoman of radiation oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian told CNBC. Scientists have been hoping to create a vaccine for cancer for a long time, but new innovations in immunotherapy have reinvigorated the effort.

When researchers want to try out a new treatment, how do you gain access to the trials? That’s one of the big questions around clinical trials for cancer treatment. Finding and enrolling in clinical trials can be really tricky. The primary place to find them is called clinicaltrials.gov. If you are being treated at a medical center that does not include a research center, you can also ask your doctor if you are eligible for any clinical trials, either at a nearby hospital or from home in an at-home clinical trial.

 

Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.

---