The expectation is over: We have a cancer vaccine that kills tumour cells and prevents cancer recurrence

There are several cancer vaccines currently being developed or already in use to help treat cancer. These vaccines work by stimulating the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells. Some cancer vaccines are targeted at specific types of cancer, while others are more general and can be used to treat a variety of cancers.

An example of a cancer vaccine is a vaccine called Provenge, which is used to treat prostate cancer. Provenge is a personalised vaccine made from the patient's own immune cells. It works by stimulating the patient's immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells.

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Another example is a vaccine called CIMAvax, which is used to treat lung cancer. CIMAvax acts on a protein called epidermal growth factor (EGF), which is found on the surface of many types of cancer cells. By blocking the action of EGF, CIMAvax helps to slow the growth and spread of cancer cells.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital have developed a cancer vaccine that can eliminate established tumours and induce long-term immunity to prevent cancer recurrence. Scientists have been searching for ways to turn cancer cells into effective anti-cancer agents. The research team from Khalid Shah's lab at the Brigham has made a major leap in cancer vaccine research by developing a dual-acting, cancer-killing vaccine that has shown promising results against the deadly brain tumour glioblastoma in a laboratory study. The results of their study were published in Science Translational Medicine.

According to the researchers, they have manipulated living tumour cells to develop a new therapeutic vaccine against cancer that not only eliminates established tumours but also trains the immune system to prevent cancer recurrence.

Turning tumour cells into cancer killers

Corresponding author Khalid Shah explained that they have been working on a simple idea to turn cancer cells into cancer killers and vaccines. Shah is the director of the Centre for Stem Cells and Translational Immunotherapy (CSTI). "Using genetic engineering, we are transforming cancer cells to develop a therapeutic that kills tumour cells and stimulates the immune system to both destroy primary tumours and prevent cancer," Shah said, as quoted by Science Daily.

While most labs working on cancer vaccines use inactivated tumour cells, Shah's team uses live tumour cells instead. The advantage of using live tumour cells is that they can travel long distances in the brain, the researchers said. They used the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to turn live tumour cells into tumour cell-killing agents. In addition, the engineered tumour cells were designed to be easily recognised and detected by the immune system, enabling a long-term antitumor response.

The vaccine can be used for a wider range of tumours Shah and his team tested their dual-action cell therapy (repurposed CRISPR-enhanced and backbred therapeutic tumour cells) in an advanced mouse model of lethal glioblastoma and found it to be safe, applicable and effective.

The researchers believe that their therapeutic strategy would be applicable to a broader range of solid tumours. However, they pointed out that further studies of its applications are needed. Other experimental cancer vaccines with promising results  Many other cancer vaccine candidates have shown promise in early clinical trials.

Last year, an experimental therapeutic cancer vaccine called "vax-innate" had shown significant regression of tumours in animal trials. Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who developed the vaccine, said that intravenous (IV) administration of the vaccine can increase the number of T-cells (which can attack tumour cells) and change the tumour microenvironment.

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In 2020, a team from Mater Research at the Translational Research Institute announced that they had successfully conducted preclinical trials of a cancer vaccine that has the potential to fight a number of cancers, including leukaemia, breast cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer. They said they are ready to test the vaccine on humans.

The lead researcher, Associate Professor Kristen Radford, said their vaccine has several key advantages over other cancer vaccine candidates. One is that it targets the key tumour cells needed to trigger tumour-specific immune responses, which increases efficacy and reduces side effects. Another major advantage is that the vaccine can also be produced as a clinical formulation that is not commercially available.

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