Cancer-preventing vaccines are now being tested in healthy people at high risk for disease—and early trials are yielding glimmers of promise. LongReads
When Dave Dubin learned at age 29 that he had colon cancer, it wasnt a big surprise. His grandfather and father had both survived the disease. “It was almost the Dubin way, and we just went on,” Dubin says. He had surgery and chemotherapy, but his cancer came back 10 years later. Genetic testing finally found an explanation for his family’s trials: a mutation in a DNA repair gene that lets genetic errors pile up in dividing cells.
Vaccines to prevent certain types of cancer already exist. They target viruses: hepatitis B virus, which can trigger liver cancer, and human papillomavirus, which causes cervical and some other cancers. But most cancers are not caused by viruses. The Lynch vaccine trial will be one of the first clinical tests of a vaccine to prevent nonviral cancers.
A third type of immunotherapy, vaccines to treat cancer, has lagged. Efforts took off in the early 1990s, when researchers began to tally dozens of tumor antigens that might rouse a patient’s immune defenses. Often these antigens are proteins that cancer cells use to grow or spread, so the antigens are good markers of cancer cells.
The trial’s modest success led to a larger, placebo-controlled trial to see whether the vaccine prevented new polyps in people who had had them removed. This time, just 11 of 53 participants who received the vaccine produced plentiful antibodies, possibly because the patients’ immune-suppressing polyps had been removed only recently.
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