Cancer interception vaccines
Vaccinating people who do not have cancer yet but are very likely to get it, against the antigens their future tumour will carry.
Lynch syndrome tumours share recurrent frameshift neoantigens, making a shared off-the-shelf vaccine possible; Nous-209 has been tested in Lynch carriers, and a preventive vaccine against alpha-lactalbumin is in early trials for triple-negative breast cancer at the Cleveland Clinic. The strategy asks a healthy person to accept risk for a probabilistic benefit, so the safety bar is far higher and trials need long follow-up with adenoma or lesion endpoints.
How it works
Immunising against antigens a future tumour is predicted to express creates memory T cells that eliminate transformed cells before a clinical cancer forms.
- Intact immune system and zero tumour burden
- Shared antigens allow an off-the-shelf product
- Cost-effective even if only modestly effective
- Long, expensive trials with surrogate endpoints
- Very high safety bar in healthy people
- Autoimmunity risk against self-antigens
Latest papers
topQuery for this technology: (TITLE:"Cancer interception vaccines" OR ABSTRACT:"Cancer interception vaccines") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma). Results are unfiltered search hits about Cancer interception vaccines, not a curated reading list.