A cancer vaccine, which acts as a kind of “Trojan horse” in the body, showed promising results in a study led by researchers at Italy and published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The research was carried out with 12 patients with a subtype of colon tumor already in the metastasis phase and was carried out by specialists from the Giovanni Armenise Harvard Foundation through the Italian Institute for Genomic Medicine (IIGM) at the Istituto di Candiolo of the Piedmont Foundation for Oconlogy (IRCCS).
There was also the collaboration of the French-Italian biotech Nouscom and the support of the Fondazione AIRC per la Ricerca sul Cancro.
Simply put, the vaccine enters the body to “trick” the cells, carrying information to make the tumor cells recognizable to the immune system.
Through this, it enhances the response against cancer and also the immunotherapy medicines given to the patient. This way, it is possible to combat the resistance that the body has to these medications.
Therapeutic vaccines against cancer have been studied for many years and, like preventive vaccines used in the case of diseases caused by viruses, their objective is to teach the immune system to recognize and combat danger.
In this case, cancer is identified based on “peculiar” proteins from tumor cells. There are several strategies being studied: one of them is messenger RNA (mRNA), a strategy also used in some of the successful vaccines against Covid-19.
In the case of this formula, a gorilla adenovirus was used, rendered harmless and responsible for transporting various traces of tumor cells to induce the immune system.
The clinical study with patients applied both the immunizer and an immunotherapy medicine belonging to the family of immune checkpoint inhibitors. The result was high efficacy in all patients. In some of them, the effectiveness was verified up to two years after application.
The researchers discovered that the vaccine works by increasing some immune cells that have the function of identifying and killing cells infected with viruses or tumors.
This is a particular population of CD8+ lymphocytes with characteristics similar to stem cells and that manages to escape the exhaustion mechanisms that usually pass through immune cells and chronically exposed to the cancer.
“We understand the mechanism of action that determines the effectiveness of the vaccine. Thanks to this increased knowledge, we can transform our experimental analyzes into more precise targeted therapies for each patient”, explained the director of the Immunoregulation laboratory at Armenise-Harvard, Luigia Pace.
“Furthermore, considering that the technique for making these vaccines is definitively proven and that the data obtained in this first clinical trial are very promising, the concrete possibility of creating new effective vaccines against many other types of cancer is prospected”, concludes Pace.
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