Scientists are about to commercialize the first personalized vaccine against cancer. If it works as expected, the vaccine, which stimulates a person’s immune system to identify the tumor from its unique mutations, could effectively stop many cancers.
Unlike conventional chemotherapies, by using the body’s natural defenses to selectively destroy only tumor cells, the vaccine limits the damage caused to healthy cells. Attacking immune cells could also detect any missing cancer cells after the initial treatment.
The possibility of a vaccine of this style began to take shape in 2008, five years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, when geneticists published the first cancer cell sequence.
Soon after, they began comparing the DNA of tumor cells with that of healthy cells. These comparisons confirmed that all cancer cells contain hundreds, if not thousands, of specific mutations, most of which are unique to each tumor.
A few years later, a German company called BioNTech presented convincing evidence that a vaccine with six copies of these mutations could activate the body’s immune system to produce the T cells prepared to search, attack and destroy all the cancer cells present in the body.
In December 2017, BioNTech began a large trial of the vaccine in cancer patients, in collaboration with the biotech giant Genentech. This ongoing experiment is aimed at 10 types of solid cancers and is expected to include more than 560 patients from around the world.
Both companies are designing new manufacturing techniques to produce thousands of personalized vaccines economically and quickly. This will be complicated because to create the vaccine it is necessary a biopsy of the patient’s tumor, sequence and analyze its DNA, and produce it base on that information. As soon the vaccine is finished, it has to be delivered quickly to the hospital; because delays could be deadly for the waiting patient.
Source: Agencia ID
