Nearly a year ago, Brian Wright’s lower jaw was replaced with bone taken from his leg. Now, doctors at the Clatterbridge Cancer Center in Liverpool, England, hope their treatment can prevent cancer, so the tumor in his mouth does not return.
Brian is recovering well, but doctors are concerned that the cancer in his head and neck has a high chance of returning.
They had included Brian in a trial to test a vaccine made from his own tumor, an injection that should have alerted his immune system to early signs of a cancer recurrence.
To make the vaccine, first, cancer cells are removed from a patient.
DNA mutations that are unique to tumors are identified and then cut, and pasted into harmless viruses.
When a virus is injected into the body, it trains the immune system to target cancer cells, hoping to destroy them before they even form lumps. At first, Brian was hesitant to go through the trial.
“If you have cancer of your throat and they’re going to inject you again with the cancer, it seems hard to imagine. But when you talk to people who explain (about this treatment, they say) that it won’t bring the cancer back, but it will. stop it,” Brian Wright told the Associated Press.
Christian Ottensmeier, clinical director of the cancer center treating Brian Wright, said he was optimistic that the development could lead to significant improvements in the treatments available to patients.
“If we can train the immune system to pick out cancer cells that cause cancer recurrence, at a time when we can’t see them, then the chances of long-term survival for patients will be much higher,” Christian Ottensmeier told the Associated Press.
Initial trial results from a small group of patients are promising. So far eight patients have received the vaccine and they remain healthy several months after receiving treatment. The second group of eight patients was not given the injection.
So far, the cancer in two of them recurred. The vaccine they are using at the Clatterbridge Cancer Center is highly experimental, but is the same technology used to produce an effective COVID-19 drug during the pandemic.
The injection of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine co-developed with the University of Oxford is made in the same way. The mRNA technology used by the companies Pfizer and Moderna was also originally developed to treat cancer. Professor Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford said the pandemic had accelerated the development of this vaccine.
“We have studied the safety of this vaccine from billions of people, while previously only from thousands. This is very helpful safety data. And it means that now there will be more investment in areas such as cancer, where better therapies are still urgently needed. ,” added Adrian Hill.
Brian Wright gets his vaccine dose every three weeks. He felt he was fine. [di/jm]
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