Tomorrow's Cure: How personalized vaccines combat cancer

Cancer

Tomorrow’s Cure: How personalized vaccines combat cancer

By
Joel Streed

July 24, 2024

The new episode of Tomorrow’s Cure highlights the efforts of research scientists who are equipping a vaccine with bits of proteins that redirect the immune system's efforts to specifically fight cancer. The vaccine aims to prevent breast cancer tumors from returning, as relapsing cancer is often more aggressive and difficult to treat. The latest research also seeks to understand why some breast cancer tumors evade the body's immune response.

Featured experts are Dr. Keith Knutson, an immunologist and cancer vaccine researcher at Mayo Clinic; Dr. Saranya Chumsri, a Mayo Clinic hematologist; and Dr. Nora Disis, director of the University of Washington Institute of Translational Health Science and the Center for Translational Medicine in Women’s Health at University of Washington.

Vaccines help to protect people from deadly viruses, but can they also help fight cancer? Vaccine trials are underway to target aggressive cancers such as triple-negative and HER2-positive breast cancers. These types of cancers have a high reoccurrence rate.

"I think the tricky part is trying to activate our immune system to be able to recognize that particular cancer. It's different in different types of cancer," says Dr. Chumsri. "I think in breast cancer, it might be difficult for the immune system to generate the effective immune response, but that's what we all try to work for."

"We have a number of different approaches that we're using. So, for example, we have peptide vaccines that are administered with this danger signal so that we can alert the immune system to respond," explains Dr. Knutson.

Experts say, in the future, vaccines would target cancer risk factors, such as inflammation.

"We're actively working on vaccines targeting cancer risk factors like chronic inflammation," says Dr. Disis. "So this would potentially be able to reduce their risk of development of cancer by controlling that chronic inflammation."

To learn more about the progressive work being done with cancer vaccines, check out the latest episode of Tomorrow’s Cure. To learn more about Tomorrow's Cure and see a complete list of episodes and featured experts, visit tomorrowscure.com.

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