"Scientists are looking for better options, including cancer vaccines. Advances over the past few years have buoyed cancer biologists with enough hope that some suggest that a cure could be possible. The objective with therapeutic vaccines - which have shown promise for prostate and skin cancer - is to train a person's immune system, after surgery and chemotherapy, to seek and destroy pancreatic cancer cells, no matter where they are. Immune memory then guards against a tumour returning."
"Two strategies are at the vanguard. Both tutor the immune system to attack proteins that are more plentiful on the surface of pancreatic cancer cells than they are on other cell types. One targets changes to proteins that are specific to a person's cancer to create a tailored vaccine, the other takes aim at subtle alterations in a protein that are hallmarks of pancreatic cancers."
Pancreatic cancer has a dismal prognosis: roughly 10% five-year survival and average survival around four months. Many patients present with vague symptoms and more than half have metastatic disease at diagnosis, making surgery viable only for non-metastatic cases. In the Netherlands, 65% of patients do not receive tumour-targeting treatment because disease is too advanced. Chemotherapy regimens help only a very small minority. Researchers are developing therapeutic vaccines to train the immune system to find and destroy residual cancer cells and create immune memory. Two main vaccine strategies target patient-specific mutated proteins or common altered pancreatic cancer proteins.
Read at Nature
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