US researchers announced on Sunday that in a small, early experiment, nearly a third of patients with advanced liver cancer who got a customized vaccination created by Geneos Therapeutics combined with an immunotherapy drug experienced a shrinkage of their tumours according to Reuters.
According to preliminary research findings published in Nature Medicine and presented at the American Association for Cancer Research in San Diego, vaccines based on mutations found only in a patient’s tumour may improve the immune system’s capacity to identify and combat cancers that are difficult to treat.
After several past failures, the industry is one step closer to developing successful cancer vaccines according to the findings, which still need to be verified in a bigger experiment. Additionally, the types of cancers that these medicines may treat may be expanded.
To create vaccinations based on neoantigens—new mutations that are specific to each patient’s tumour—researchers collected samples from patient tumours. The goal was to train the immune system to target and eliminate these special proteins specifically, sparing healthy tissue.
Liver cancer is classified as a cold cancer because it has fewer mutations than skin cancer, which makes immunotherapies less effective. Skin cancer, on the other hand, has numerous mutations for the body to identify.
