Following on from their breakthrough human trial that successfully reprogrammed the immune system to overpower glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, the same scientists have now further developed the mRNA vaccine to fight not one but any cancer. It has the potential to do away with chemotherapy,…
  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    17 hours ago

    The likelihood that all cancers express a common surface marker that is never expressed by any non-cancerous cell seems pretty low. Not a cancer biologist, but there’s all kind of different genetic paths to cancer - why would they all cause some specific molecule to be expressed and why would no other cell ever use it?

    • AmidFuror@fedia.io
      0·
      17 hours ago

      Your instincts are correct. The approach in the paper is more complicated than this. Here is the abstract:

      Abstract The success of cancer immunotherapies is predicated on the targeting of highly expressed neoepitopes, which preferentially favours malignancies with high mutational burden. Here we show that early responses by type-I interferons mediate the success of immune checkpoint inhibitors as well as epitope spreading in poorly immunogenic tumours and that these interferon responses can be enhanced via systemic administration of lipid particles loaded with RNA coding for tumour-unspecific antigens. In mice, the immune responses of tumours sensitive to checkpoint inhibitors were transferable to resistant tumours and resulted in heightened immunity with antigenic spreading that protected the animals from tumour rechallenge. Our findings show that the resistance of tumours to immunotherapy is dictated by the absence of a damage response, which can be restored by boosting early type-I interferon responses to enable epitope spreading and self-amplifying responses in treatment-refractory tumours.