Next Scientific Breakthrough - Cancer Vaccine Could Be Available Within 5 Years

After decades of limited success, scientists say their research is reaching a turning point, with many predicting cancer vaccines within the next five years.

These aren't traditional vaccines that prevent infection, but shots that shrink tumors and stop the cancer from coming back. Targets for these experimental treatments include breast and lung cancers, with successes reported this year for melanoma and pancreatic cancer.

Vaccines could be the next big step in cancer treatment.

'We're making it work. Now we need to make it work better,' said Dr. James Gulley, who heads a center at the US National Cancer Institute that develops immunotherapies, including cancer vaccines.

Vaccine trains T cells to kill cancer

Scientists understand more than ever how cancer hides from the body's immune system. Cancer vaccines, like other immunotherapies, harness the immune system to find and destroy cancer cells. And some new ones use mRNA technology , which was developed for cancer but is being used for the first time in a Covid-19 vaccine.

For a vaccine to work, it needs to teach the immune system's T cells to recognize cancer as dangerous, said Dr. Nora Disis, of the Cancer Vaccine Institute at UW Medicine in Seattle. Once trained, the T cells can travel to any part of the body to hunt for the threat.

'If you look at an activated T cell, it almost has legs. You can see it crawling through the blood vessels to get out into the tissues,' says Disis .

Patient volunteers are crucial to the study. Kathleen Jade, 50, learned she had breast cancer in late February, just weeks before she and her husband left Seattle for a round-the-world adventure. Instead of sailing the 40-foot Shadowfax across the Great Lakes toward the St. Lawrence Seaway, she was sitting in a hospital bed awaiting her third dose of an experimental cancer vaccine. She was being given the vaccine to see if it would shrink her tumor before surgery.

'Even if the chance is a little bit, I feel like it's worth it ,' said Ms Jade.

A nurse injects the third dose of an experimental breast cancer vaccine into patient Kathleen Jade at the University of Washington Medical Center - Montlake, Seattle on May 30, 2023. (Photo: AP)

Advances promise effective cancer vaccine treatment

Cancer vaccine advances are challenging. The first, Provenge, was approved in the US in 2010 to treat metastatic prostate cancer. It involves manipulating a patient's own immune cells in the lab and returning them intravenously. There are also vaccines for early bladder cancer and advanced melanoma.

'All the failed experiments helped us learn a lot,' said researcher Nora Disis.

So now she's focusing on patients with earlier disease, since the experimental vaccine didn't help those who were severely ill. Her team is planning to study the vaccine in women with a low-risk, noninvasive form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ.

Several cancer vaccines also hold promise. The hepatitis B vaccine has been studied for decades to prevent liver cancer, and the HPV vaccine, first introduced in 2006, will prevent cervical cancer.

In Philadelphia, Dr. Susan Domchek, director of the Basser Center at Penn Medicine, is recruiting 28 healthy people with BRCA mutations (tumor suppressor genes) to test a vaccine. These mutations increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The idea is to kill abnormal cells early, before they cause problems. Domchek likens it to periodically weeding a garden or erasing a whiteboard.

Other research groups are developing vaccines to prevent cancer in people with precancerous lung nodules and other genetic conditions that increase cancer risk.

'Vaccines are probably the next big thing in reducing cancer deaths,' said Dr Steve Lipkin, a medical geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who is leading an effort funded by the US National Cancer Institute . 'We are dedicating our lives to that.'

Drugmakers Moderna and Merck are also working together to develop a personalized mRNA vaccine for patients with melanoma, with a large study set to begin this year. The vaccine is tailored to each patient based on the many mutations in their cancer tissue. A personalized vaccine in this way could train the immune system to look for the cancer's mutations and destroy those cells.

But such vaccines would be very expensive.

'You basically have to make every cancer vaccine from scratch ,' said Dr. Patrick Ott at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. If the vaccine isn't personalized, it can be made very cheaply, like the Covid vaccine.

Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines will be very expensive. (Photo: Getty Images).

The vaccines being developed at UW Medicine are designed to work in many patients, rather than just one. Trials are underway in early and advanced breast cancer, lung cancer, and ovarian cancer. Some results could come in next year.

Todd Pieper, 56, of suburban Seattle, is taking part in a trial of a vaccine to shrink his lung tumor. His cancer has spread to his brain, but he hopes to live long enough to see his daughter graduate from nursing school next year.

Pieper said of his decision to volunteer: 'I have nothing to lose and everything to gain, for myself or for others in the future.'

One of the first people to receive the ovarian cancer vaccine in a trial 11 years ago was Jamie Crase of Mercer Island, near Seattle. Diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer at just 34, Crase thought she would die young and willed her favorite necklace to her best friend. Now 50, she shows no signs of cancer and still wears the necklace.