Stepping Towards a Cancer Vaccine
Researchers continue to work at developing a safe way to provoke the immune system into destroying cancer cells: "The discovery in the 1970s of unique sugars on cancer cells set scientists in search of a way to get the immune system to recognize and attack cells that express these cancer-associated sugars. Until now, however, the results have been less than spectacular. ... early cancer vaccines were created by linking the tumor-associated carbohydrate with a foreign protein. The immune system, perhaps not surprisingly, attacked the protein and the linker molecules, but generally left the carbohydrate alone. ... We needed to come up with a vaccine that does not give our immune system a chance to go after anything else but the tumor-associated carbohydrate ... When we tested our best vaccine we got really, really fabulous antibody levels that have never been seen before ... The vaccine has been successful in creating an antibody response that can kill cultured epithelial cells - those commonly involved in most solid tumors, such as breast and colorectal cancer - derived from mice and in stimulating an immune response in healthy mice. The researchers are currently testing the vaccine in mice with cancer, and [hope] to start phase I clinical trials in humans within a year." If medicine often looks like engineering, that's because it is.
Link: http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/071029_CancerVaccine.shtml