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What are cancer vaccines and have scientists finally found a cure?

Vaccines have revolutionised medicine, protecting millions of people from measles and mumps, polio and coronavirus. They have also wiped out smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases in human history. Now experts believe they can form part of the toolbox needed to fight off cancer for good. They will not replace surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy any time soon but could play a key role in immunotherapy, the fourth weapon against cancer. There are many challenges, and making personalised jabs for individual patients takes time, but the hope is that the process could speed up in future. Doctors and scientists have been working on cancer vaccines for decades but they have now reached a point…

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Featured

 Cancer vaccines are showing promise. Here’s how they work.

The immediate goal is to create vaccines that destroy cancer cells—but some scientists are also testing vaccines that might prevent someone from developing cancer.

 Cancer Vaccines: Preventive, Therapeutic, Personalized

Cancer vaccines are a form of immunotherapy that can help educate the immune system about what cancer cells “look like” so that it can recognize and eliminate them. In the case of cancer, however, the situation is more complicated for several reasons, which has made it more difficult to develop vaccines to prevent or treat cancer. In particular, unlike bacteria and viruses, which appear foreign to our immune system, cancer cells more closely resemble our normal, healthy cells. Furthermore, each individual’s tumor is in some sense unique and has its own distinguishing antigens. As a result, more sophisticated approaches are necessary to develop effective cancer vaccines. Viral infections are responsible for the development of several cancers, and preventive vaccines play an important role in reducing risk. For instance, cervical cancer and head and neck cancer can be caused by human papillomavirus...

 The extraordinary promise of personalised cancer vaccines

Glioblastomas are an extremely aggressive type of brain tumour, which is why the news this week of a vaccine that has shown promise in fighting them is so exciting. And this comes right off the back of the announcement of another trial of the world’s first personalised mRNA vaccine for melanoma, a kind of skin cancer. Ian Sample talks to Prof Alan Melcher of the Institute of Cancer Research about how these vaccines work and whether they could one day be used to target cancer before it is even detectable on scans

 ‘This will happen before 2030’: how the science behind Covid vaccines might help to fight cancer

The success of mRNA-based drugs in combating coronavirus is inspiring scientists to create similar vaccines for melanoma and other tumours.

Articles of Interest

After Giving Up on Cancer Vaccines, Doctors Start to Find Hope

Encouraging data from preliminary studies are making some doctors feel optimistic about developing immunizations against pancreatic, colon and breast cancers.

An mRNA Melanoma Vaccine Shows Promise

In the study, Moderna and Merck combined their cancer treatments—Moderna’s experimental cancer vaccine and Merck’s approved checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda)—to achieve potentially life-changing results for melanoma patients.

BioNTech’s founder on the future of mRNA technology

This week, Ugur Sahin tells us how mRNA will help fight pandemics and diseases such as cancer

Cancer vaccines gain momentum, after years of disappointing results

Cancer vaccines have traveled a potholed road over the last decade. But as researchers from different companies and academic institutions presented promising early data at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in San Diego this week, experts said there’s a collective feeling of turning a corner.

Cancer vaccines in the clinic

Vaccines are an important tool in the rapidly evolving repertoire of immunotherapies in oncology. Although cancer vaccines have been investigated for over 30 years, very few have achieved meaningful clinical success. However, recent advances in areas such antigen identification, formulation development and manufacturing, combination therapy regimens, and indication and patient selection hold promise to reinvigorate the field.

Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

After several decades, therapeutic cancer vaccines now show signs of efficacy and potential to help patients resistant to other standard-of-care immunotherapies, but they have yet to realize their full potential and expand the oncologic armamentarium.

How does a cancer vaccine work?

After decades of slow progress, therapeutic vaccines that direct the immune system to attack tumours could soon become a fixture of cancer treatment.

How mRNA vaccines could be personalized cancer cures

An expanding pipeline of vaccines is giving patients new hope against some of the deadliest cancers, by training the body's immune system to attack malignancies.

I Wish I’d Gotten the HPV Vaccine

By the time the HPV vaccine was approved, I’d already had my first abnormal Pap smear. I’ll be doing everything I can to protect my daughter from the same fate.

Moderna, Merck Show Progress Toward Cancer Vaccines

An mRNA shot helped prevent relapse in high-risk melanoma patients.

Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise in Small Trial

Using mRNA tailored to each patient’s tumor, the vaccine may have staved off the return of one of the deadliest forms of cancer in half of those who received it.

Personalised mRNA vaccines: a revolutionary new approach in melanoma treatment

We’ve made massive improvements in treating melanoma, especially with drugs that enable the immune system to recognise melanoma cells and kill them (known as immunotherapy). But despite the tremendous successes here, sometimes these drugs are very toxic – causing inflammation of lung or gut tissue, for example. Other times, they fail to work, so melanomas return or spread – known as relapse. Enter personalised messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines – a cutting-edge therapeutic approach that leverages the body’s own immune system to fight cancer, potentially with fewer side-effects than existing treatments.

Personalized Melanoma Vaccine Could Be a ‘Game Changer’ by Teaching the Body to Fight Cancer Cells

A global trial has begun for the world’s first personalized vaccine for melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer, which affects about 132,000 people per year. If successful, the therapy will prevent melanoma from returning in patients who have already been treated.

The Cancer Vaccine

Only one in three American girls is vaccinated against HPV. That will mean thousands of gratuitous cancer deaths. Young people in the South are especially unlikely to get the vaccine, according to a new study. Why?

The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer

A lot is riding on the outcomes of these trials, but scientists are cautiously optimistic that breast cancer care will look markedly different over the next few years—and that vaccines for cancer will move away from treating advanced disease to making a difference at earlier stages

What are these ‘cancer vaccines’ I’m hearing about? And what similarities do they share with COVID vaccines?

We already have a vaccine to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical and other cancers. We also have a vaccine to protect against the hepatitis B virus, which can cause liver cancer. But you may have heard of new types of cancer vaccines being developed using technology similar to that used for COVID vaccines. Decades before COVID vaccines, scientists had been working on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines targeting cancer.

Where We Are in the Hunt for a Cancer Vaccine

For decades now, the prospect of personalized cancer vaccines has tantalized medical scientists. Studies in lab mice were perpetually encouraging. But there was no proof with humans. Now the most impressive evidence yet suggests that this long-awaited form of immunotherapy may actually work in some patients. “Cancer vaccine” might seem like a surprising term for this treatment, since it doesn’t prevent a person from getting the disease and each shot has to be customized. But like any vaccine, it summons the immune system to attack a dangerous foe.

Why Aren’t There More Cancer Vaccines?

Maybe the reason we have so few cancer vaccines is that they’re harder to develop than treatments for patients who already have cancer, which are more common. But in an as yet unpublished study, economists Eric Budish and Heidi Williams teamed up with patent lawyer Ben Roin to argue that the scarcity of preventive measures and relative abundance of late stage cancer treatments can also be blamed on the distorting effects that the U.S. patent system has on medical research.

‘Maybe the Coronavirus Was Lower-Hanging Fruit’

Emerging mRNA technology proved excellent for COVID vaccines. BioNTech’s founders preview what that could mean for cancer and other mysteries.

‘Real hope’ for cancer cure as personal mRNA vaccine for melanoma trialled

Excitement among patients and researchers as custom-built jabs enter phase 3 trial.