Personalised cancer vaccines that target people’s individual tumours have shown early signs of promise in tests on three patients diagnosed with advanced skin cancer. The vaccines were designed to make the patients’ immune systems unleash attacks on specific DNA mutations in their tumours, and so turn the body’s natural defences against the disease. The approach, tested for the first time on people at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found that the vaccines caused the patients to launch powerful immune reactions against the tumours.
Though promising so far, the research is at a very early stage, and the researchers cannot yet say whether the patients’ health improved after the treatment. All three are stable and suffered no side effects, but further trials are needed to see whether the treatment can help to shrink or even eradicate tumours. “These custom-designed…
