Vaccines made from mutated proteins found in tumours have bolstered immune responses to cancer in a small clinical trial.
The results, published on 2 April in Science1, are the latest from mounting efforts to generate personalized cancer therapies. In this case, three people with melanoma received vaccines designed to alert the immune system to mutated proteins found in their tumours.
It is too soon to say whether the resulting immune response will be enough to rein in tumour growth, but the trial is a crucial proof of concept, says Ton Schumacher, a cancer researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam.
“We don’t really know how strong an immune response has to be to be clinically meaningful,” he says. “Nevertheless, it’s an important step.”
Cancer is a genetic disease, driven by mutations that lift the brakes on cell proliferation. But the mutated proteins produced by cancerous cells can serve as a siren call to immune cells, signalling the presence of a cell that has become, in a sense, ‘foreign’.
Unfortunately, many of these calls are never heard. Some tumours suppress nearby immune responses, and mutated tumour proteins may not be expressed at high enough levels to rally immune cells.
Source: Nature World News
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