RE: Todays news6 Jan 2023 12:08
Hi Desamax, I posted part of a New Scientist article on cancer vaccines back in the summer. At the time, each personalised vaccine was about $100k a pop -
"The first big breakthrough came in 2011 with the approval of checkpoint inhibitors, a class of drugs that boosts the anti-tumour activity of important parts of the immune system called T-cells. Thanks to checkpoint inhibitors, some people with cancer who would have been given months to live have survived more than a decade.
Checkpoint inhibitors, however, don’t work for everyone’s cancer: 50 per cent at best survive for five years in melanoma clinical trials. They also don’t work for every type of cancer – for example, they are powerless against most bowel cancers.
That is why researchers have continued to search for other ways to supercharge the immune system against cancer. One strategy is vaccination, which aims to increase the number of T-cells that can fight tumours. If T-cells are thought of as an army, checkpoint inhibitors make the soldiers stronger and vaccination recruits extra soldiers. A combination of these strategies could be extremely powerful.
One patient also began getting injections of a checkpoint inhibitor called pembrolizumab – more commonly known as Keytruda – to give an extra boost to the newly recruited T-cells. “It was like a one-two punch,” said the patient as his tumours started rapidly shrinking before his eyes. “I could actually see the one that was sticking out of my back getting smaller.”
It is hard to know how much of this impressive recovery was due to the personalised vaccine and how much to the pembrolizumab. One researcher believes the synergy between the two was key. “It is possible that the pembrolizumab did it alone, but it would be unusual to have such a profound response as quickly as he had it,” he says.
Of the seven other trial participants, most of whom received the vaccine without any pembrolizumab, six are still alive and appear to be cancer-free. “We showed that the personalised vaccines were safe and, excitingly, produced a very robust immune response, which was something that hadn’t been shown before with cancer vaccines,” said the researcher.
However the trials were small and unable to show conclusively that personalised cancer vaccines are effective. “Ultimately, we need large randomised controlled trials to show that this can actually work, but you can imagine that it’s not cheap. Each vaccine can cost $100,000 or more."
Fortunately, there are some companies that can afford this kind of research. These include BioNTech in Germany and Moderna in the US, which both began working on personalised cancer vaccines."
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