New cancer vaccine method boosts potency and scope
Source: Eurek Alert!, February 2025
Vaccines to treat cancers have been around since 2010, the first being approved for prostate cancer, and another in 2015 for melanoma. Since then, many therapeutic—as opposed to preventive—cancer vaccines have been in development, but none approved. One hurdle is the difficulty in finding antigens in tumors that look foreign enough to trigger an immune response.
Researchers at Tufts University have now developed a cancer vaccine that effectively amplifies the visibility of tumor antigens to the immune system, leading to a potent response and a lasting immunological memory that helps prevent the return of tumors after they have been eliminated. Their vaccine avoids the need to hunt down a specific tumor antigen, instead relying on a digested mix of protein fragments called a lysate that can be generated from any solid tumor.
The vaccine they produced worked against multiple solid tumors in animal models, including melanoma, triple-negative breast cancer, Lewis lung carcinoma, and clinically inoperable ovarian cancer.