Background

In recent years, therapies that are designed to boost our body’s immune system have revolutionised the treatment of cancer. However, these treatments don’t work in all patients, or against all cancers. That’s because right now we don’t completely understand how different parts of the immune system work together and interact with tumour cells. Currently available immune-boosting therapies – known as ‘cancer vaccines’ – are only targeting a small number of molecules on the surface of tumours, often only triggering a weak response by our immune system. 

Professor Lindy Durrant and her team of scientists from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and the USA believe that there is a far greater repertoire of molecules that could be targets for cancer vaccines waiting to be discovered. Using the latest vaccination technology, the team believe that they can design cancer vaccines that achieve a much better immune response in significantly more patients.

By not focusing on a single molecule or type of cancer but rather exploring the full spectrum of molecules and combination of molecules capable of inducing specific anti-tumour responses, this Grand Challenge project aims to build templates for how to treat different cancers, with the hope that eventually cancer patients will be offered a vaccine that is specifically designed for their unique tumour.

The Research

In a project spanning four countries, across two different continents, Professor Durrant’s team aim to develop a better understanding of molecules on the surface of tumours – known as ‘tumour antigens’ – that could be targets for treatments. The team will screen huge numbers of these tumour antigens and use machine learning tools to predict which of these would trigger a good immune response in individual patients with cancer. Alongside this, the team will be testing a variety of ways of delivering the treatment to make sure that their vaccine gets to the tumour as efficiently as possible. 

Armed with this knowledge, the team will then test their ideas in investigator-initiated clinical studies – with a special focus on patients with head and neck cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer and one type of brain tumour. This will provide crucial missing pieces of the puzzle as to how personalised cancer vaccines can impact patients.

Impact 

This research could result in a paradigm shift in the way we treat cancer. If successful, these templates for cancer treatment will allow doctors to easily identify which antigens to target, and then which type of vaccine to use, to create truly bespoke vaccines for each patient. As this type of treatment will be personalised based on each patient’s unique tumour, this could radically improve survival on a global scale.