As someone who works and lives near the legendary Jonas Salk Institute for Biologics in San Diego, I have been somewhat patiently waiting for breakthroughs to happen in the cancer vaccine community.
The cancer science community has been waiting for this, too. Ever since Salk and his team largely saved the world from the ravages of Polio, the human race has hoped for similarly powerful and effective vaccines.
There hasn’t been nearly the kind of activity in that world as we all had hoped. But it’s not for lack of trying. It’s really no one’s fault. This is tricky stuff.
But this is a new day. A new world. And there is now real hope of advancements in the understanding of cancer, and this is leading to more vaccines and vaccine candidates.
At the American Association for Cancer Research, they are working hard to educate the public about this new era of cancer vaccines that is coming soon.
There are in fact several vaccines that protect against human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common cause of cervical cancer and a major cause of anal, oral, throat, and genital cancers.
By preventing HPV infection, these vaccines also prevent the cancer-causing changes induced by HPV.
According to AACR, the first HPV vaccine was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006, and since that time, the rate of cervical cancers has dropped significantly among people who were vaccinated as adolescents.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends HPV vaccines for all adolescents (boys and girls) beginning at age 11 or 12 and up to age 26 for those who didn’t receive them earlier. Some people might be eligible for the vaccine after age 26 as well.
But as AACR notes, to date, only one targeted therapeutic cancer vaccine has been approved by the FDA.
However, researchers have continued to develop and test different types of cancer vaccines, with many of these showing recent promise against hard-to-treat cancers.
In an interview posted on the AACR website, Catherine J. Wu, MD, FAACR, the Lavine Family Chair of Preventative Cancer Therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, predicts that this year will bring developments in targeting shared neoantigens, treating diverse tumor types, combining vaccines with other immunotherapies, and evaluating cancer vaccines in large, industry-sponsored phase II clinical trials.
“I expect to see renewed interest in targeting shared neoantigens that arise from driver mutations in different tumor types, which could allow us to make progress in creating off-the-shelf vaccines,” she said.
Stay tuned everyone.
