If you are diagnosed with cancer, could a personalized vaccine help shrink your tumor?
Researchers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center have brought us closer to that possibility. They have developed a vaccine made of dendritic cells that stimulate an immune response to battle cancer tumors, according to a posting on SmartPlanet.com.
Scientists grew the cells from a sample of a patient’s blood, mixed them with proteins from the patient’s tumor, and injected the mixture into the patient. That vaccine stimulated an immune response from the patient’s protective white blood cells, which attacked the tumor.
“There were two basic questions we wanted to answer: One, can we generate an antitumor response, and two, does it matter?” lead researcher Richard Barth Jr., chief of general surgery, said in a statement. “From our research, the answer to both questions is yes.”
For the study, Barth operated on 26 patients to remove tumors that had spread from their colon to their liver. Patients were given their vaccines one month after surgery and in more than 60 percent of the cases, the vaccine induced immune responses against the patients’ tumors.
Five years after being given the vaccine, 63 percent of the patients who demonstrated an immune response against their own tumor were alive and tumor-free.
To read the full posting on SmartPlanet.com — Go Here Now.