A Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise

I'm sure most everyone reading this blog has dealt with personally, or has had a close family member or friend that has been diagnosed with cancer.  While detection and treatment of cancer has greatly improved over the past two decades, it still is one of the most devastating diagnoses a doctor might have to give.  This is even more so the case with malignant forms of brain cancers as surgery and/or drug treatment typically only delays progression of the disease for a short time, in part, due to difficulty in operating on the brain, but also the fact that our bodies do a very good job of preventing many proteins and chemicals from reaching the brain (aka the blood-brain barrier) including many potentially helpful drugs.

Now, one of the holy grails of fighting cancer has been to make a vaccine to fight it.  The concept of making such a vaccine has been around for as long as I can remember.  In fact, my uncle, who died of kidney cancer, was asked by his doctors at the VA if he wanted to participate in a trial to make a vaccine for his cancer over a decade ago (he opted to not take part).  Unfortunately, the idea of a cancer vaccine has proven difficult to turn into reality.  There are a few reasons for this, but I want to highlight just a couple.  First, vaccines for infectious diseases (what we normally associate vaccines with) rely on the fact that the virus and/or bacteria looks very different than the cells in your body.  The immune system uses these differences to kill the bad stuff and leave our bodies in tact.  Cancer, however, doesn't look all that different from the rest of the body to the immune system, making it difficult to elicit a robust immune response.  Second, almost every cancer from every patient is slightly different, so making a single vaccine for more than one person is not really feasible.  For that reason, most attempts to make a cancer vaccine has required removing part of the cancerous material, growing it up in the lab, grinding it up with some adjuvants (think Red Bull for your immune system) and injecting it back into the patient.  Sadly, for most cases it hasn't really worked....well with the exception of a new study centered on glioblastomas (very deadly forms of brain cancer).

The new study, led by Dr. Parsa at UCSF, has used individual vaccines to treat glioblastomas in 8 patients.  While the usual prognosis of glioblastoma is measured in months, all 8 of the patients in the study are alive and well, all a full year after receiving the vaccine.  Is this a cure for glioblastoma?  No, probably not, but it is a huge step forward.  It will be very interesting to see how these patients fair as time marches on but we can hope that the continued use of this vaccine will extend the lives of many more cancer patients in the future.