Scientists Pursue Cancer Vaccines Tailored to the Genetic Makeup of an Individual's Tumor (cnn.com) 49
"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN.
Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer...
The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer...
Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added...
By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said.
A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma.
"All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN.
"To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."
Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer...
The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer...
Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added...
By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said.
A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma.
"All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN.
"To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Same thing they did with the Covid vaccine. Beg for it after they’re in the hospital and it’s too late.
Re:Just waitin (NOT) (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck
Re: (Score:3)
Any infection they might have received was far less severe [arizona.edu] than they would have had they not got vaccinated. Instead of possibly being hospitalized for weeks, all the associated costs, having long covid and other complications such as blood clots from covid or heart arrhythmia, they were out for a week or so then back to work.
“If you get vaccinated, about 90% of the time you’re not going to get COVID-19,” said Jeff Burgess, MD, MS, MPH, associate dean for research and professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and principal investigator of the Arizona Healthcare, Emergency Response, and Other Essential Workers Surveillance (AZ HEROES) study. “Even if you do get it, there will be less of the virus in you and your illness is likely to be much milder.”
In fact, the more shots you get greatly reduces your chances of long covid [scientificamerican.com].
And before you start whining about a covid vaccine not being 100% effective, no vaccine is 100% effecitve.
Re: (Score:2)
Bollocks. People died after catching Covid when fully vaxxed. That is not less severe.
People died after getting the MMR vaccine [nih.gov]. What's your point? Tens of millions should get infected and die or clog the hospitals for weeks and months because a tenth of a tenth of a tenth percent of people died after getting the vaccine? Considering the number of people who died after receiving a covid vaccine died from the vaccine is statistically insignificant, your whining is irrelevant.
You people really are deluded, aren't you?
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me you don't understand vaccinations without telling me you don't understand vaccinations......
Yes, fully vaccinated people died after contracting Covid. But without the vaccine, they would have very likely died anyway.
The vaccine, unlike historical vaccines, doesn't contain "dead" or "mostly dead" samples of the virus that your body can use to prime the immune system, which means you couldn't "catch" covid from the vacccine. Instead it contained direct instructions on how to prepare your immune sys
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Cancer is the second most-frequent cause of death worldwide, killing more than 8 million people every year; the incidence of cancer is expected to increase by more than 50% over the coming decades19,20. ‘Cancer’ is a catch-all term used to denote a set of diseases characterized by autonomous expansion and spread of a somatic clone. To achieve this behaviour, the cancer clone must co-opt multiple cellular pathways that enable it to disregard the normal constraints on cell growth, modify the local microenvironment to favour its own proliferation, invade through tissue barriers, spread to other organs and evade immune surveillance21. No single cellular program directs these behaviours. Rather, there is a large pool of potential pathogenic abnormalities from which individual cancers draw their own combinations: the commonalities of macroscopic features across tumours belie a vastly heterogeneous landscape of cellular abnormalities.
This heterogeneity arises from the stochastic nature of Darwinian evolution. There are three preconditions for Darwinian evolution: characteristics must vary within a population; this variation must be heritable from parent to offspring; and there must be competition for survival within the population. In the context of somatic cells, heritable variation arises from mutations acquired stochastically throughout life, notwithstanding additional contributions from germline and epigenetic variation. A subset of these mutations alter the cellular phenotype, and a small subset of those variants confer an advantage on clones during the competition to escape the tight physiological controls wired into somatic cells. Mutations that provide a selective advantage to the clone are termed driver mutations, as opposed to selectively neutral passenger mutations.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
mRNA vaccines were previously being developed and already gone through some clinical trials for cancer, it was repurposed for COVID.
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously not. And obviously you are deeply stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you an idiot, a troll, or both?
With the way things are going (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know how after seeing Google Gemini, you'd want to live in a world without "far right crazies".
It seems to me those guys are massively more sane than the world Google Gemini is hinting at.
Re: (Score:3)
That seems mostly harmless compared to the loonies opposed to the cervical cancer vaccine, and the world they are hinting at.
Re: With the way things are going (Score:2)
Re:With the way things are going (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know how after seeing Google Gemini, you'd want to live in a world without "far right crazies".
Because a piece of mangled software is the same thing as a bunch of people trying to overthrow [imgur.com] the government [imgur.com] because they didn't like [go.com] the results of an election [imgur.com], recorded themselves [imgur.com] committing election fraud [imgur.com] because they didn't lke the results of the election, being offended at American history [cnn.com], want to have highly partisan library boards [imgur.com] so they can more easily ban books, hire hitmen to try and kill their political opponents [bbc.com] when they lose elections, post delusional rants [imgur.com] about famous people, create many [imgur.com] paintings [imgur.com] and fake pictures [imgur.com] of a golden cow, putting their mental delusions [imgur.com] on full display, and outright admitting they want to impose theocracy [imgur.com] and do away with the Constitution.
Yup, clearly the same thing.
Wagner's vaccine (Score:2)
~90% cancer-free with the vaccine as opposed to 20 alive and waiting for a recurrence without it. For something tailored to have your immune system attack the cancerous cells only and avoid all th
Re: (Score:2)
Immunotherapy has its own nasty effects. I hope the vaccine is gentler than CAR-T, which genetically engineers T cells to attack cancer cells. Hospitalization from the effects is common and my friend who had it was warned to stay within a short drive of the hospital.
At that cost, it offers a 50% rate of actual cure. Sadly my friend was in the other 50%.
Stage 4 cancer here (Score:4, Interesting)
Diagnosed April 2022. As luck would have it, I was in the process of getting a life insurance policy when a routine screening found the stage 4 cancer. So, got fucked there, no life insurance.
Completed (3) 3-month rounds of chemotherapy.
Completed (1) 3-month round of radiation + chemotherapy
Completed 4 surgeries
About to complete a 4th 3-month round of chemotherapy
I have a CT scan on Monday. I don't expect it to be promising. From prior discussions, I expect to get my "12 months or less" letter.
My child just turned 8 years old. My smoking hot wife is 47 years old.
So.....yeah, inject me with whatever you've got, I'll try it. Sadly, these checkpoint inhibitors and the new therapies like this that they come up with are not "for" the mutations I've got. I've got the super hard to kill/drug shit. Hurray for me.
They'll probably announce a cure the day after I'm dead.
Hail Mary, if you want one... (Score:2)
If you want to try for a Hail Mary you might consider fasting, as outlined in a recent Jordan Peterson [youtube.com] video.
Another Hail Mary might be the work of Paul Stamets [bastyr.edu], who claims that a mushroom extract cured his mother of cancer. (I've got a bottle of these, they give me headaches, he had to stop mentioning which ones cured his mother's cancer, but if you carefully go through his older videos you can piece together the ones he used and purchase them online at his web site IIRC.)
Do your own research and note that
Re:Hail Mary, if you want one... (Score:4, Interesting)
Jordan Peterson is not an MD, he has a PhD in psychology .. he knows nothing about cancer and is a very evil sick person. If fasting cured cancer, nobody would die of it .. have you seen what cancer does to appetite? There's a reason people lose a ton of weight when they get cancer. And no it's not because the tumor is eating all the nutrients .. think about it .. if that was true their overall weight won't change.
Re: (Score:1)
Disregard the parent post (Score:2)
Jordan Peterson is not an MD, he has a PhD in psychology .. he knows nothing about cancer and is a very evil sick person.
Flamebait and misleading.
Jordan Peterson is not an MD, but the person he's interviewing definitely is, which is why I posted that specific interview.
The previous responder mentioned some of the mechanisms of fasting regarding cancer, so you have to allow that there is at least some scientific basis for the practice.
And finally: sick evil person? You can disagree with Jordan Peterson on his philosophy, but calling him evil is derangement on the part of the poster.
Don't pay any attention to the previous post,
Re: (Score:2)
Who? Dr. Chris Palmer? He's a psychiatrist with exactly zero publications on cancer treatment. Fasting to cure cancer is a fad thing. At best intermittent fasting, without overall nutrient/caloric deficit, might be helpful for mood which in turn might reduce your stress level and help your body fight the cancer. But expecting to starve out the cancer is as good an idea as trying to drown a shark. Tumors evolved in a resource-stricken microenvironment .. pretty sure they can handle starvation better than the
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Recommend the following reading: "The Hallmarks of Cancer" by Douglas Hanahan, Robert Weinberg
"Microcompetition with Foreign DNA and the Origin of Chronic Disease." Hanan Polansky
"Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes" assorted authors, https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Life sucks sometimes..
FWIW I have been through it twice now, but fortunately came out the other side.
My son was 2 when I was first diagnosed. Devastating to say the least.
Just keep up the fight, and don't give in. That's the only way to win.
The medical system won't just do it for you, you have to be your own advocate.
Anyways, nothing anyone says here is going to cure you.
But my thoughts are with you.
PS been clear for over 20 years now!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The reverse is also being done. (Score:1)
Creating a notch in the immune system to prevent autoimmune responses that characterize lupus, Crohn's disease, etc.
Who sez basic research isn't worth it?
Re: (Score:1)
Selection pressure (Score:2)
These remedies will work for a while, then selection pressure will cause mutations that avoid it to give a survival advantage to the cells that can evade this mechanism ...
For example, for prostate cancer, at a certain stage, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is given. These are basically drugs that inhibit testosterone production or block the receptors for it. After a while under treatment, the cancer can mutate and become "castrate resistant", and that treatment is no longer viable. Other treatments are
Re: (Score:2)
Cancer isn't a virus. It is itself, a mutation of your bodies own DNA. There is no selection pressure.
Re: (Score:3)
Said with complete confidence, though completely wrong, and contrary to observed studies ...
Cancer is not a virus, that is true (although some viruses are known to cause cancer, but that is a different topic).
Complex organisms are just a collection of cells. Any cell can have a mutation, whether it is in a human, cow, algae or bacteria.
Cancer cells have DNA that has changed in some ways (ignore the normal checkpoints on proliferation, evade certain immune system mechanisms, increased vascularity, and so on
Re: (Score:3)
Fake news!!! Wait-- Sorry. Reflex.
This is a level of study I had not encountered before-- I am willing to admit ignorance, which is rare for me.
I sit corrected.
I grok the premise that any cell can have a mutation-- that's the basis of evolution. Some mutations help, some don't-- some don't, but do (blue eyes and sickle cell anemia, if I recall biology learned sometime during the Reagan Administration). The biggest argument I can see is cancer cells can't mutate at the same rate as bacteria-- bacteria are
Re: (Score:2)
Glad my post was of use ...
Cancer is terrifying!
Your body and mine have cancer cells all the time, but the immune system keeps them in check. They kill any cells that exhibit certain traits.
Trouble starts when cancer mutates to make itself invisible to the immune system.
But before that ... for cancer to develop there are multiple mutations that have to happen to a given cell (I heard that they are at least 3, but forgot the details). The first one is a checkpoint in mitosis that gets bypassed, and there is
Re: (Score:2)