The advent of vaccinations came when a scientist, by the name of Edward Jenner, discovered that an individual exposed to a particular disease is protected from a close variation of another. At the time, smallpox was devastating to patients. Different methods of trying to preemptively build immunity, such as variolation, were sought to avail patients of symptoms. However, it came to Jenner’s attention that milkmaids did not get the smallpox disease. He performed a series of experiments in which he would try and purposely infect them. As a result, the milkmaids did not contract smallpox, because they had already been exposed to cowpox – a less severe disease caused by a similar virus. Jenner then employed a young boy to further test his hypothesis. He exposed the boy to cowpox and once he recovered, Jenner repeatedly inoculated him with the smallpox virus. Astonishingly, the boy did not contract smallpox. Jenner, for the first time, demonstrated concept of immune memory, in which immune cells build a response to previously exposed pathogens. Consequently, when an individual is exposed to the same or similar disease, the immune system is well equipped to recognize and reject the invader. Since this discovery, scientists have found different ways to prime and boost our immune system before coming in contact with any strain of disease.
Vaccines work to expose our bodies to pathogens and better fight off disease in the future. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) works to predict the most common and prevalent flu strain each year. Through a series of predictive models and experiments, scientists generate our annual flu shots. Although this does not guarantee protection against all strains and individuals still may get sick, it provides the best preemptive care for the cold seasons. Scientists have been working to apply vaccine technology to other diseases as a treatment opposed to a prophylactic measure. Currently, many researchers are investigating how the immune system can be primed to respond to cancer through vaccination.
A recent paper in Nature, by Dr. Toni Choueiri and others, demonstrated that a cancer vaccine improves therapeutic efficacy in patients with late-stage kidney cancer. Choueiri is a physician and Director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary (GU) Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. His work focuses on finding novel biomarkers to improve personalized medical treatment in cancer patients. Choueiri also works with researchers to develop immunotherapies for different kidney malignancies, including renal cell carcinoma (RCC).
Choueiri and others report that nine patients with stage III and IV RCC were vaccinated after surgical resection. Researchers noticed a strong anti-cancer immune response in these patients after vaccination, which targeted other tumors still present in the body. Standard treatment with RCC includes surgery to remove the primary tumor, but at later stages the cancer tends to spread to other organ sites. Additionally, two-thirds of patients tend to have reoccurring tumors after surgery. Therefore, finding a robust therapy post-surgery is critical for RCC patients. These results have a major impact on the field as the clinical trial moves forward.
Choueiri’s team personalized each vaccine to the patients based on specific tumor biomarkers. To do this, researchers used predictive algorithms to predict the best vaccine to generate and provide patients. As a result, cancer vaccinations for RCC post-surgery have been extremely successful. This is a major breakthrough in cancer therapy and vaccine science. The idea of using a vaccine for cancer treatment has been proposed for decades, but the efficacy in the clinic has always been limited based on cancer type and stage. This work provides hope that cancer vaccines can work in the proper setting and improve patient care.