A Vaccine for Cancer?

Vaccines for Cancer? A novel approach to prevention and treatment.

Brief Description

More than 11,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in Australia each year, and while the disease has many high-profile advocates, reliably effective treatments are still to be found.  Professor Vasso Apostolopoulos, a senior researcher based at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, has been part of a research team that over the past decade has made several major discoveries in cancer immunotherapy research.

Breast cancer is still the most common cause of cancer-related death in women in Australia. Although the death rate is on the decline, more than 2,000 Australian women still die each year from the cancer. The figures vary slightly, but somewhere between one in eleven and one in eight women are being diagnosed with breast cancer before the age of 75.

While there is no current means of preventing breast cancer, a novel approach by scientists at the Burnet Institute using vaccines is providing hope for development of a more effective, preventative strategy, and perhaps a less traumatic treatment program for those with the disease.  

Scientists at the Institute are investigating how cancer cells are recognised or ignored by the immune system, and developing techniques to stimulate immune responses to destroy specific cancer cells.

Work is focusing on the most commonly diagnosed adenocarcinomas such as breast, lung, colon, ovary and pancreas, where the outcome of this research will have the greatest impact. These are much more difficult to immunize against than virus associated cancers, e.g., cervical cancer, where strong immune responses can be very effective as recently shown by Prof Ian Frazer in Brisbane.

The science behind the vaccine is based on the fact that these cancers frequently make very large amounts of a protein called mucin 1 (MUC1), which distinguishes tumour cells from normal tissues. Scientists can make a synthetic fragment of MUC1 (denoted FP) and link it to the sugar molecule, mannan, to form a vaccine antigen (M-FP). The vaccine antigen stimulates T cells (white blood cells) to destroy the cancer cells.

Professor Apostolopoulos a senior research scientist at the Burnet Institute said the development of the vaccine has potential to revolutionise the treatment for people living with a range of cancers and opened up new possibilities for the use of vaccines as a cancer prevention strategy.

While it will be some time before the use of vaccines for the treatment and prevention of cancers becomes available, clinical trials are currently underway in a number of centres around Australia and overseas.

“Phase I Clinical trials of the vaccine have been completed in patients with MUC1+ adenocarcinomas in Victoria, Queensland and Athens and showed promising results. On the basis of these results an expanded clinical trial injecting the vaccine is continuing,” said Professor Apostolopoulos.  

Professor Apostolopoulos said if results from new clinical trials proved favourable the commercialisation of the vaccine could begin with treatments available to patients within 10 years or so.

The vaccine treatment approach is also being improved by using special hormones (cytokines) which improve the efficacy of the vaccine by further helping in the stimulation of the T cell response against the cancer cells.

In addition, other research at the Institute is investigating the use of the vaccine with dendritic cells to stimulate a greater immune response to cancer cells.

Dendritic cells are the body’s cells principally responsible for recruiting the immune system against invading microbes or mutated cells. Patients’ dendritic cells are collected by a process known as leukapheresis and exposed to the M-FP vaccine.  These vaccine-loaded cells are then injected into the skin of the cancer patients.

It has become clear during the past four years that this method and the specific features of the research strategy do stimulate a strong immune response in patients. However, it is too soon to assess if these immune responses provide a long term benefit to assist in cancer treatment – the most difficult aspect of this work. The effect of the vaccine can be rapidly measured in ovarian cancer.  This is one objective of a current phase II clinical trial to be completed within a year.

Using similar technology, research by several groups at the Institute is also being directed to develop vaccines against infectious diseases such as malaria, influenza, HIV and other common diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

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