PREVENTION is the goal of most vaccines. Not so vaccines against cancer, which rally the immune system to fight an existing disease. That approach might change now that a protein has been found that stops mice developing breast cancer.
Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and colleagues took a protein made by cancerous, breast cells, and injected it into mice engineered to develop breast cancer. This primed their immune systems to attack tumour cells and prevented cancer (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.2161). As the protein is made by healthy lactating cells, too, such a vaccine might one day prevent cancer in non-lactating women.
A protein made by cancerous breast cells prevented cancer in engineered miceThat would be a first. Prostate cancer vaccine Provenge extends life but hasn't yet stopped cancer arising, while cervical cancer vaccines prime the immune system against a cancer-causing virus, not cancer itself.
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Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Mouse vaccine raises prospect of cancer prevention
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