Time to get personal.26 Jun 2022 13:13
Very interesting article by Alice Klein in the New Scientist page 38. Can’t post a link as I only have a magazine.
Anyway she discusses how personal cancer vaccines are coming and are targeted so they don’t make people sick - unlike chemo.
She sets out checkpoint inhibitors, car t-cell therapy and personalised vaccines.
Primarily the story is about BioNTech and Moderna who are both conducting trials.
Then Riccardo Dolcetti at the Peter MacCallum Centre in Melbourne questions their approach siting two distinct drawbacks.
First the time it will take to make them and second the cost.
He does stress one of the best things about cancer vaccines is that their targeted nature means that they don’t make people sick, unlike chemotherapy.
If only there was another trial that could target cold tumours and turn them hot. Praveen Aanur, one of Moderna’s chief oncologist is looking at exactly that so that hot tumours can become more susceptible to vaccine treatment.
Dolcetti said “The difficulty is knowing what to target, but several groups around the world are working on this”.
So data data data. Good luck Scancell. I think people are watching.
ATB