Preliminary Study May Be Small Step Towards Immune-Based Cancer Treatment
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shironosov/itock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — A preliminary medical study may represent the first step towards training the body’s immune system to recognize and fight cancer cells.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science Express, involves three case reports where researchers created tailor-made cancer vaccines based on melanoma tumors removed from the specific patients. The researchers found that when the vaccine was administered, the patients saw a strong immune response, particularly an increase in cancer-fighting T-cells.
The study is extremely preliminary, as the data was not compared to patients receiving a placebo, and the number of patients looked at is very small. Still, researchers hope that it could be a small step towards a larger trial.
“This proof-of-principal study shows that these custom-designed vaccines can elicit a very strong immune response,” one of the study’s authors, Dr. Gerald Linette, a medical oncologist at Washington University, said. “We still have much more work to do, but this is an important first step and opens the door to personalized immune-based cancer treatments.”
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