researchers from Mayo Clinic They are working on developing personalized therapeutic cancer vaccines, which could attack the distinctive features of tumors in every person.
The new approach builds on advances in genomic research and data analysis. It also has transformative potential to increase the immune system’s power to identify and attack cancer cells.
“For some cancer patients, the vaccine could induce shrinkage of their tumors and provide long-term and lasting anticancer immunity.” So says Dr. Keith Knutson, co-director of the immunology and immunotherapy program at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Florida and co-creator of the Mayo Clinic Custom Neoantigen Vaccine Program.
Vaccines with proteins included
Dr Knutson notes that personalized cancer vaccines are designed similarly to flu or COVID-19 vaccines. Where the key ingredient is a specific disease-related protein.
The expert explains that when the immune system learns to recognize this protein, it can stimulate the production of killer T cells to fight it.
Thus, with the therapeutic vaccine strategy against cancer Mayo Clinic, the main building block is made up of pieces of a person’s unique tumor protein mutations, known as neoantigens.
Microscopic fragments of the protein are generated by genetic mutations in cancer cells. Neoantigens can only be found on the surface of cancer cells, not on healthy cells.
Since neoantigens are foreign to the body, they can be recognized by the immune system as pathogenic invaders.
Importance of immunotherapy
The specialist says that, when combined with immunotherapy, the vaccine could help generate a strong defensive response in the patient.
“The idea is that if we can identify between 20 and 30 mutated proteins in a person’s cancer, we can include them in a vaccine,” he says. Subsequently, people can be immunized repeatedly while receiving immunotherapy treatments with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
In preclinical animal models, Dr. Knutson and his team applied the combination of immunotherapy and vaccine to treat breast cancer. They found that dual therapy prolonged survival without causing significant toxicity.
Design personalized vaccines for each patient
The vaccine development process uses extensive sequencing methods and computational algorithms to select up to 36 neoantigens.
This choice, which is among hundreds of thousands of neoantigens, can generate the strongest immune response.
Once the neoantigens are selected, Dr. Knutson formulates the vaccine ingredients with the goal of eliciting the strongest immune responses possible to completely destroy the tumor.
Dr. Knutson hopes the strategy may soon be presented in clinical trials for the treatment of different types of cancer and disease prevention.
