Packing lipid nanoparticles with tumor proteins to boost cancer vaccine potency
Source: Medical Xpress, February 2025
The concept of using vaccines to treat cancers has been around for several decades. A vaccine was first approved for prostate cancer in 2010, and another was approved in 2015 for melanoma. Since then, many therapeutic—as opposed to preventive—cancer vaccines have been in development, but none are approved. One hurdle is the difficulty in finding antigens in tumors that look foreign enough to trigger an immune response.
Researchers at Tufts 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.