Administration of an effective vaccine against several types of cancer, combined with immunotherapy, improves survival in acute myeloid leukemia.
- Acute myeloid leukemia is a form of blood cancer.
- Researchers show that a vaccine combined with immunotherapy can improve patient survival.
- The serum targets dysregulated amino acids in tumor cells.
The world’s first vaccine is over 200 years old. Since then, these serums have shown their effectiveness in preventing many diseases. Today, scientists are particularly interested in its use against cancer. Vaccines could help train the immune system to fight cancer cells. This is what a team from the School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago demonstrated in Blood Advances. They prove that vaccination, combined with immunotherapy, would reduce mortality from acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer.
Cancer vaccine: how to spot cancer cells?
“From an immune perspective, cancer can appear like healthy tissue, so the immune system does not always mount a spontaneous response.”remember Anna Slezak, doctoral student in molecular engineering and lead author of the scientific article. With her team, she is working on methods for identifying cancer cells to successfully target them. “Tumor cells, unlike healthy cells, have unpaired cysteine molecules on their surface due to metabolic and enzymatic dysregulation. she announces. These amino acids can become the desired target.
The method involves attaching a drug to the material that targets these amino acids to boost the immune response and turn the tumor cell into a vaccine. “Our material binds specifically to these free thiols (the name given to unpaired molecules editor’s note) and can attach our adjuvant to the tumor cell, to tumor debris, regardless of the thiol to which it is attached.“, indicates Anna Slezak. Concretely, this makes it possible to mark cancer cells or their debris in the blood and trigger the immune response.
Vaccine and immunotherapy: a dual strategy against cancer
To elicit an even more effective response, researchers combined administration of the vaccine with treatment with cytarabine, a chemotherapy commonly given to patients with acute myeloid leukemia. This made it possible to increase “in a significative way” the survival rate after administration of the vaccine intravenously. According to the authors, because this vaccine approach does not target any specific cancer protein, it could be applicable to other blood cancers. For now, these various tests have only been carried out on laboratory mice. American researchers emphasize that a lot more pre-clinical work will need to be done before launching clinical trials on patients.