Ovarian cancer vaccine improves women’s survival rates

A personalised cancer vaccine that trains the immune system to attack tumours has had encouraging results in women with ovarian cancer. 

Ovarian cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in women – around 7,300 women in the UK are diagnosed with it each year. The disease often isn’t recognised until it has already spread, and even after successful treatment, there is a high risk of the cancer returning. Only half of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive for five years or more.

Cancer vaccines have been showing promise in clinical trials, but few worldwide have made it into the clinic for routine use. Many of these vaccines are designed to train immune cells to recognise particular molecules that are often present in cancer cells, but this can fail because tumours vary between different people.

To get around this problem, Lana Kandalaft from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and her team have created personalised vaccines that are tailored to each individual tumour. To do this, they take samples from a woman’s tumour and kill the cells with acid, which exposes molecules that are normally hidden. These dead cells are then mixed with immune cells from the woman’s blood, and grown in the lab for a few days before being injected back into her.

The team found that the vaccine was safe and did trigger immune responses against the women’s tumours. The women who showed stronger immune responses subsequently lived longer than those with weaker ones.