Researchers at Dartmouth are fighting cancer with a personalized vaccine developed from the patient’s own tumor:
The personalized vaccines were injected into each patient a month after surgery. Barth was able to determine that about 60% of the patients developed an immune response from the vaccine.
About five years later, he was able to compare the clinical outcomes between those who had had an immune response, and those who had not. Of the group who did not have an immune response from the vaccine, only 18% were alive and tumor-free. Of the group who did have an immune response from the vaccine, 63% were alive and tumor-free — a remarkable result indeed. (The vaccine approach has the added benefit of being non-toxic, in contrast to chemo.)
I suppose that still leaves some questions of causality.
Anyway, one of the keys to their (apparent) success is that they weren’t relying on the vaccines to kill fully grown tumors:
“The small number of T-cells generated by a vaccine can’t destroy a large tumor. However, what they may be able to do is search out and destroy tumor cells that exist as only microscopic deposits. Once we brought patients into a measurable tumor-free condition with surgery, the anti-tumor T-cells induced by the vaccine may help keep them that way.”
(Hat tip à mon père.)