Soon a treatment against the evil of the century. Cancer vaccines will be in the spotlight at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) congress to be held this weekend in Chicago (USA). The opportunity to talk to you about these vaccines that could revolutionize medicine and treat cancers, among other things.
“It is not a preventive vaccine which prevents having cancer, but a vaccine aimed at treating patients already affected in order to reduce their risk of recurrence”, explains Christophe Le Tourneau, professor, medical oncologist at the Curie Institute.
“We can create vaccines for each patient depending on the tumor they have and the mutations that are specific to each,” adds Professor Le Tourneau. For therapeutic purposes and personalized according to the patient and his cancerthe vaccine consists in educating the immune system – thanks to theuse of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) – to help it fight against specific targets specific to the tumour.
“Cancer cells are distinguished from normal cells by mutations. The goal is to create vaccines based on these mutations (RNA or DNA, editor’s note) and D’educate the immune system so that it recognizes them and then goes and destroys the cancerous cells”, explains the oncologist. According to him, this technology can be applied to many types of cancers, including pediatric cancers and cancers of the elderly.
If the results obtained by the researchers are encouraging, the marketing of vaccines is not planned for now. Indeed, other tests on a larger scale must be carried out. “We have preliminary results. The next step is to carry out a randomized trial that is to say with a draw where half of the patients have the new treatment and the other half do not. It is only at the end of these trials that we can proclaim that the treatment is better than the standard”, indicates Christophe Le Tourneau. Verdict therefore by “2026 or 2027”.
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