New vaccine antigen found in both cancer and fetus !!!
This isn't Geron but its more excellent news on vaccines and cancer!!!!!!!!!!
Cancer hope as vaccine trials start
Doctors aim to save thousands of lives by forcing the body's immune system to destroy tumours
Jo Revill, health editor
Sunday August 27, 2006
The Observer
A new vaccine which targets some of the most serious forms of cancer may prevent patients from suffering a relapse once they have had initial surgery or drugs treatment.
A trial involving 700 patients with kidney cancer will start this year across Britain and other European countries. Half will be given injections of TroVax as well as their normal chemotherapy drugs. The others will have the drugs plus a placebo injection. The survival rates of the two groups will then be compared.
Although it is still early days, the work already done suggests the therapy is safe and that it does trigger the body's own immune system to attack the tumour. Other clinical trials looking at the vaccine's impact on patients with colorectal cancer is also planned, as are further studies for breast cancer sufferers. There is even a veterinary product which has been made in order to treat cancer in dogs and cats.
One of the most exciting areas for cancer treatment now lies in the development of vaccines, 40 years after the idea was first mooted. There are two types of immunisation: those that are therapeutic and used to treat existing cancers, such as TroVax, or those which are prophylactic to prevent the development of cancer in the first place.
The NHS is likely to see the introduction within the next year of a vaccine to prevent women developing cervical cancer. The vaccine Gardasil has been designed to fight four strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV) which are responsible for around the great majority of cases. If teenagers could be vaccinated at school before they become sexually active, they could drastically reduce the incidence of the cancer, which kills around 1,000 British women a year.
Therapeutic vaccines are able to take advantage of the fact that some molecules which live on the surface of cancer cells are either unique to that cancer, or more abundant than they would be in healthy cells. But there are no such treatments yet licensed - all are in varying degrees of development.
The idea for TroVax initially came from scientists at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research in Manchester, who were interested to know why the immune system doesn't 'see' cancer cells as dangerous or foreign and therefore does not mount an attack on them.
The same applies to the growing foetus, which for some reason is not rejected by the pregnant mother although it contains foreign cells, so scientists hunted for proteins that might be found in both cancer patients and pregnant women.
What they found was 5T4, a protein which lies on the surface of a cancer cell but is also found in the placenta and in the foetus, and which appears to be key to helping cells move around the body. Scientists took a modified form of a virus and genetically engineered it so that it would enable the body to produce antibodies to fight 5T4.
Oxford Biomedica, a biotech company spun off from Oxford University which manufactures the therapy, is now about to embark on a Phase III trial which will look at the long-term survival rates of patients with the main form of kidney cancer, known as renal cell carcinoma.
More than 6,000 patients are diagnosed with kidney cancer each year, and if caught early, it has a good prognosis, but many are diagnosed when it has spread to other parts of the body. The company is planning further studies involving patients with colorectal and prostate cancer.
Mike McDonald, its chief medical officer, said : 'Unlike vaccinations for measles or mumps, patients having this treatment would need to have injections every one or two months because once the effect starts to diminish, you need to do it again. But we are hopeful that it can help people who may already have undergone surgery but where there is a danger of relapse.
'We know in colorectal cancer there is this danger because you get these deposits of small and isolated cells which have escaped, and are suitable for attack by the immune system.'
Gus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St George's Hospital in south London, has helped to develop a vaccine which may prove effective against prostate cancer, and is now embarking on a large-scale randomised trial carried out across many centres.
He said: 'There have been problems with some of these therapies such as resistance building up as the cancers themselves change, but I think overall it's positive, and that we are close to having active cancer vaccines for many people.'
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