Israeli scientists 'train' immune system to fight cancer

The fight against cancer may one day be aided by a new development: Scientists at Tel Aviv University in collaboration with the Israeli company Vaxil BioTherapeutics say they have developed a vaccine that can "train" cancer patients' bodies to search, find and destroy cancerous cells. If approved for use, the vaccine could help cancer patients' immune systems fight common forms of the disease, including breast and prostate cancer.

Vaxil BioTherapeutics said last week that interim results from clinical trials of the therapeutic vaccine have shown positive results. The trials, conducted at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem on patients suffering from multiple myeloma (a type of blood cancer), have shown that the vaccine activates the immune system to target cancer cells.

The vaccine, called ImMucin, “trains” T-cells (immune cells that protect the body) to seek and destroy cells that display a specific molecule (or marker) called MUC1 – typically found only on cancer cells, but not on healthy ones. More than 90 percent of different cancers carry the MUC1 marker, which points to the vaccine's immense potential in treating the disease.

Of the ten patients who participated in the clinical trial, seven who completed the treatment with ImMucin displayed significant improvement in the way their immune systems responded to the cancerous cells.

So how does the vaccine work? The scientists discovered that they could use a unique sequence contained in the MUC1 marker to spur the immune system to identify the cancerous cells and attack them. Cancerous cells generally avoid detection by the immune system because they are not perceived as a threat. As opposed to infections or viruses, tumors are created from the body’s own cells.

Now the scientists who developed ImMucin are looking to expand the study to test the vaccine's effectiveness in fighting other types of cancer. They believe the vaccine could be used to fight small tumors, if they are detected early enough, and prevent their recurrence, or prevent the spread of the disease in patients who have been treated using other methods.

The vaccine is meant for people who have already been diagnosed with cancer and cannot be used as a preventive vaccine, like traditional vaccines, which help the body’s immune system fend off bacteria or viruses. The results of the trial have not been formally published, but if additional trials prove successful, the vaccine could be on the market in approximately six years.

Dr. Baruch Brenner, an oncologist who heads the Gastrointestinal Malignancy Unit at the Davidoff Center at Rabin Medical Center (formerly Beilinson hospital) and one of the vaccine's developers, was cautiously optimistic, saying that it could take years to advance from the trial phase to widespread use.

"The vaccine is still in the research stage," Dr. Brenner said. "We demonstrated the vaccine's potential response in the laboratory with blood samples taken from patients. That doesn't necessarily mean that a cancer in a patient's body will react the same way."

Dr. Brenner said the vaccine's potential lies in its ability to possibly treat 90% of cancers, "but we don't yet know if this potential will be realized. There is a great likelihood this vaccine will not treat all types of cancer and it is not certain we will be able to activate an immune response in each of them."

Dr. Brenner said the trials conducted at Hadassah are only the first stage of three required for a medication to be approved, adding that for such a product to ultimately be used, "there need to be larger scale trials with a control group."

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