For the first time, an encouraging clinical trial revealed that cancer can be cured with personalized vaccination. The current immunotherapies with monoclonal antibodies inhibit molecules that prevent immune cells to attack cancer. However, this strategy does not work if the immune cells do not reach the tumor. Hence the researchers devised a novel strategy. They decoded the mutations in cancer cells of the patients that alter the cell surface antigens that immune cells are more likely to grab.
Then they synthesized the peptides of mutated cell surface cancer antigens . The melanoma patients got 5 shots of these personalized peptide vaccines in the first month and booster shots at 12 and 20 weeks. After two years most patients who had metastasis at lymph node before vaccination were cancer free. Further two-year study revealed the presence of anti-melanoma antigen specific T-cells in…
