– I look forward to a future where a patient can come to the doctor and say: Order my personal cancer vaccine and help me beat cancer, says Catherine Wu at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, USA and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in the USA .
The vision may not be so far off. Catherine Wu herself believes that it may be a matter of a few years.
Order my personal cancer vaccine and help me beat cancer
A cancer vaccine is used to treat people who are already sick. It is therefore different from vaccines against infections that are used for prevention or to reduce the spread of a virus. A cancer vaccine is a type of immunotherapy that triggers immune cells to attack cancer.
Individualized treatment
The special thing about the cancer vaccines that Catherine Wu is researching is that they are tailored to a patient. They are therefore designed to match the mutations found in the tumor of a particular patient and they can only be used on that particular patient.
– The vaccines we work with take three to four months to develop. But luckily, we can work together with the industry to streamline the process.
She and her research group have taken an interest in something called tumor neoantigens, which are structures that the immune system can recognize as foreign and start attacking. It is mutations that occur in cancer cells that give rise to tumor neoantigens.
Cancer cells develop invisibility cloaks
Through so-called sequencing technology, she can find out which tumor neoantigens are present in a certain patient. Then she makes artificial copies of them and injects them into the patient.
The immune system is then stimulated so that it becomes better at detecting and fighting the tumor cells. The question is why the body and its own immune system cannot do this itself.
– Cancer cells are smart. They develop a kind of invisibility cloak to protect themselves against the body’s immune system. The vaccine can help the immune system to be more effective.
Tested on patients
The breakthrough came with a publication in Nature in 2017 when Catherine Wu and her colleagues had tested individualized vaccines on some patients with the skin cancer form melanoma.
We got exciting results
– We got exciting results. Some of the patients who were severely ill received vaccines along with checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy. And those patients have not deteriorated and they are alive now several years later. It makes us very happy.
She believes that the technology may be used for many different forms of cancer in the future.
Get big price
This year, Catherine Wu is awarded the Sjöberg Prize, a prestigious prize of one million dollars.
– I feel very humble and very grateful that the research is being noticed. It also gives us support to continue with the research program, so that we can think innovatively and move forward with the next big step.
