A “vaccine” which delivered directly to tumors in mice has been found to eliminate all traces of those tumors, researchers have found that it works on many different kinds of cancers( lymphomas, breast and colon cancer), including untreated metastases in the same animal.
According to Stanford University – Researchers say a cancer vaccine cured the disease in 87 out of 90 injected mice, the mice had lymphoma in two places and genetically engineered to have breast cancer, the treatment was injected into one tumor, and both were destroyed. The remaining 3 had a recurrence of the lymphoma, which cleared up after a second treatment.
“It doesn’t work like the vaccines you might be familiar with, our approach uses a one-time application of very small amounts of two agents to stimulate the immune cells only within the tumor itself,” Levy said.
In tumor tissue, as a tumor grows, the immune system’s cells, including T cells, recognize the cancer cells’ abnormal proteins and move in to take care of business. But cancer cells can accumulate mutations to avoid destruction by the immune system, and suppress the T cells, which attack abnormal cells.
- This vaccine works by reactivating these T cells.
It combines two key agents. The first is a short piece of DNA called CpG oligonucleotide. This amplifies the expression of an activating receptor on T cells called OX40, which is a member of tumour necrosis factor receptor The second agent is an antibody that binds to OX40, activating the T cells to fight cancer cells.
“When we use these two agents together, we see the elimination of tumors all over the body,” said Ronald Levy, MD, professor of oncology. “This approach bypasses the need to identify tumor-specific immune targets and doesn’t require wholesale activation of the immune system or customization of a patient’s immune cells.”
Deliver locally act globally:
“The study states that when they injected mice with lymphoma tumors, the two agents not only caused regression in the tumor injected but also a second untreated tumor “
These agents are injected in microgram amounts directly into the tumor. This means that they only activate T cells inside the tumor.
This vaccine could treat tumor that had spread (metastasize) to other parts of the body, or other tumor that has not been treated because the T-cell can migrate from the site of tumor to other parts of the body.
One of the agents is already approved for use in humans while the other has been tested for human use in several unrelated clinical trials, according to Stanford School of Medicine. A clinical trial was launched in January to test the effect of the treatment in patients with lymphoma.
“All of these immunotherapy advances are changing medical practice,” Levy told Stanford.