Doctors have known for some time that people’s immune systems may help fight their cancer. In rare instances, these people’s immune systems have rejected their cancers, and they have been cured. Scientists are now trying to develop ways to encourage this immune reaction by the use of vaccines.
Unlike vaccines against infections like measles or mumps, these vaccines are designed to help treat, not prevent, lymphomas. The goal is to create an immune reaction against lymphoma cells in patients who have very early disease or in patients whose disease is in remission. One possible advantage of these types of treatments is that they seem to have very limited side effects. So far, there have been a few successes with this approach, and it is a major area of research in lymphoma treatment. At this time lymphoma vaccines are only available in clinical trials.
BiovaxID™ is a vaccine based on the unique genetic makeup of a patient’s B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The vaccine uses a unique protein (part of an antibody called an idiotype) taken from each patient’s own lymphoma cells, which are obtained during a biopsy. This is combined with substances that boost the body’s immune response when the combination is injected into the patient. A late-stage clinical trial found that in people with follicular lymphomas that went away after chemotherapy, the vaccine lengthened the time before the lymphoma came back by more than a year. The vaccine is not yet available outside of clinical trials.
