Vaccines Offer Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Cancer
17th January 2023 - Last modified 18th October 2023
By Pete Cussell PhD, Science Writer
The notion of personalised vaccines to fight cancer would have been regarded as a pipe dream decades ago. But today, advances in immunology and mRNA technology have sparked encouragement for the future. Find out more about the future of cancer vaccines in our new blog.
Last week (6th Jan 2023), the UK Government announced a new collaboration with German vaccine giant BioNTech, which will usher in large-scale trials of personalised cancer vaccines in England. This will reportedly bring 10,000 doses of personalised cancer jabs to UK patients by 2030 thanks to a new bespoke research and development hub [1].
You may be aware of BioNTech – the developers behind one of the popular mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Long before the pandemic though, BioNTech was set up with the aim of developing novel mRNA therapies for cancer.
It’s fair to say that one of the most noteworthy research developments to come out of the coronavirus pandemic has been mRNA vaccines. And today, the technology that helped to create some of the highly successful COVID-19 vaccines looks set to be a powerful tool for cancer therapy too.
The first ever cancer vaccines?
Cancer vaccines in some form have, in fact, been around for some time. Prostate cancer vaccine Provenge®, for example, was approved by the US FDA in 2010 and uses a patient’s immune cells and an antigen protein from prostate cancer cells to stimulate an immune response. The jab has demonstrated an increased survival time of just 4.1 months on average though, and comes with an eyewatering cost of £80,000 for a single course [2].
More successful cancer vaccines have been developed for cancers associated with viral infections. Jabs that protect against cancer-associated viruses are not directly targeting cancer itself however, rather they have an indirect prophylactic effect. The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is a well-known example – and an effective one too. The US CDC states that the HPV vaccine can prevent 33,700 of 36,500 HPV-associated cancer cases in the US every year [3].
Why does mRNA hold promise for cancer therapy?
In recent years, researchers have developed techniques to engineer and deliver stable mRNA to the body via vaccines. Once in the body, the mRNA prompts cells to produce proteins that stimulate an immune response against those same proteins when they are present in target cells (e.g. tumour cells).
The exciting prospect of mRNA is the speed and efficacy with which it has worked for COVID-19. Traditionally, the process of developing vaccines has taken 10 to 15 years, but the mRNA-based Pfizer-BioNTech jab was developed and administered to the first recipient in less than a year. In part, this rapid delivery was made possible by powerful next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, and NGS will likely play a key role in cancer vaccine development moving forward too.
COVID-19 has provided proof of concept for mRNA as a novel, elegant, and safe approach to vaccination. The pace with which these mRNA vaccines can be tweaked poses another significant benefit, given the many adjustments that would be required for each patient’s specific cancer in the case of personalised vaccines.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is finding an appropriate target for the vaccine. The mRNA approach will most likely rest upon initial whole genome sequencing of a patient’s tumour to identify key structural variations. By identifying mutations that are broadly distributed across tumour cells in a patient’s biopsy sample, the aim is to develop mRNA vaccines that stimulate an immune response against the patient’s cancer specifically, while causing minimal lateral damage to healthy tissues.
Further developments in the cancer vaccine world
While mRNA holds great promise as a personalised cancer vaccine, November 2022 brought news of encouraging developments from a trial of a cancer vaccine with an entirely different mechanism of action. DCVax from Northwest Biotherapeutics harnesses gene editing in order to turn cancerous cells into immunomodulators that can simultaneously eliminate active tumour cells and enable the immune system to memorise the cancer cells to protect the body from future assaults.
The DCVax vaccine targets glioblastoma, one of the most common, and most aggressive brain cancers. A 331-person global study concluded last year, and determined that the therapeutic can provide enhanced survival and years of extra life to brain cancer patients [4]. The breakthrough represents a promising line of defence for the 2,500 people who are diagnosed with glioblastoma in the UK each year. While glioblastoma patients live on average just 12-18 months following diagnosis, some patients in the phase 3 trial lived for more than eight years after receiving DCVax.
If approved by medical regulatory bodies, DCVax would represent the first new treatment in 17 years for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients, and the first in 27 years for people with recurrent disease.
An exciting prospect for the future
The future landscape looks promising for cancer therapeutics, and this has largely been thanks to the recent acceleration of NGS and gene editing technologies. With hope, the new collaboration between BioNTech and the UK government will help to deliver personalised mRNA-based vaccines to UK patients, and spark a global trend towards cancer vaccination. In any case, early promising signs should be heartening for those affected by cancer and provide optimism for a brighter future.
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References
(2) Provenge® (Sipuleucel-T) active cellular immunotherapy treatment of metastatic prostate cancer after failing hormone therapy—study results. ClinicalTrials.gov. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/results/NCT00065442
(3) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reasons to get HPV vaccine. https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/parents/vaccine/six-reasons.html
