DTN 094: Cancer vaccines are showing promise at last

“The idea behind a cancer vaccine is to introduce neoantigens directly into the body, thereby training the immune system to see any cancer that carries them as a foreign body, ripe for elimination. The theory is solid, but creating such a bespoke vaccine quickly enough to be of use is a different matter. “Not many years ago,” says Alan Melcher, a clinical scientist at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, “I would have said, hang on, that’s never going to be technically possible.” The fact that this is now possible within as little as six weeks—albeit at a cost—is in no small part due to the accelerated development of mRNA vaccines (which carry a molecule of messenger RNA) during the covid-19 pandemic. The vaccines that were used against covid-19 caused the body to build one of the constituent proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which the immune system then used to create antibodies. Cancer vaccines would do something similar for the proteins that tumors produce.”