A vaccine for brain cancer?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Researchers have developed a new vaccine that may be able to substantially lengthen the lifespan of patients with the glioblastoma multiforme variant of brain cancer.

 

During a study of 23 cancer patients, it increased survival times by at least 18 months, and only 4 of the patients died during the trial period. The vaccine works by "tagging" cancer cells with a protein that tricks the immune system into believing they are foreign, forcing it to attack the cells and destroy them. Unfortunately, however, it appears that the vaccine only works until the cancer evolves to use different receptors, at which point it becomes ineffective.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4942840.stm

[ecoli]

I was under the impression that the term 'vaccine' implies a virus is involved...

[RyanJ]

Thats a clever idea, in the end though it still has the flaw - viruses are very target specific, change the identifiers for the cell and thats it, you need a new virus.

 

Can anyone actually see a way to avoid this? Maybe making the virus "act" faster will cause the immume system to react before the cancer cells can mutate. This may get rid of it in the short term but in the end it could still come back but still an interesting development, thanks for sharing!

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[Martin]

that "tagging" trick, that makes use of the body's own immune resources, is really elegant.

 

I dont know much about cancer treatments, especially the newer ones being developed.

 

does anyone know of other cases where "tagging" has been used successfully? (it is such a good idea that I would guess it has been tried a lot by different researchers, but I didn't hear about it)

 

=============

 

as I understand it (more knowledgeable people correct mistakes please) the approach is called

"IMMUNOTHERAPY" which would I guess be the keyword to use if one wanted to find out more with Google

 

and the mechanism, if I understand correctly, is like INDUCING AN ALLERGY to the cancer cells

by making a whole bunch of an artificial version of a protein that they have on them and injecting it into the person and saying "Smell that you fighter cells ! That is FOREIGN STUFF! Go and kill anything that smells like that."

And isnt that what happens when you become allergic to something?

 

And so they go and kill the cancer cells that smell of that particular protein

and then a kind of Darwinian evolution of the cancer cells begins

and a few cancer cells that dont have that particular protein on them, and so do not smell, escape detection and survive and reproduce. Until finally the whole cancer consists of these new cells, and death goes on.

 

Anybody know other cases of cancer where immunotherapy has proven useful?