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Pinky-and-da-Brain t1_ixvke8w wrote

Reply to comment by Common_Screen9450 in Brain cancer vaccine succeeds at prolonging survival in Phase 3 trial by Sorin61

There is a newish thought in the cancer space that cancers like glioblastoma trigger your immune system in a very similar way to an infection so we should fight cancer like an infection. Also, this therapy trains dendritic cells (an immune cell type) to fight cancer which is what vaccines for viruses do (vaccines train immune cells). This “vaccine” is more of a personalized cell therapy than a traditional vaccine that you are thinking about but the name isn’t inaccurate.

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H2AK119ub t1_ixvvqe3 wrote

This is not a new thought...the field of Immuno-Oncology has been around for decades.

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Pinky-and-da-Brain t1_ixvxuvt wrote

I didn’t say immuno oncology is a new thought, I said treating cancer like an infection and creating therapies that target specific cancer is a newish thought. Your immune system remembers and targets infection with very high specificity, that is not true for cancer. Most cancer therapies over the decades have been either broad acting chemotherapies or drugs to increase tumor penetrating T cells (think pd-1 and the like). Training the immune system on specific cancers (personalized cancer therapy) like described in the article is new. These therapies are known as Car-T, dendritic cell therapies (what this article is about), as well as newer NK cell therapies. Dendritic cel therapy(cancer vaccines) require you to take a tumor biopsy, sequence the antigen, train the dendritic cell taken from the patient in a lab on that antigen/s, ensure antigen expression, and then replant the dendritic cells into the patient. That is innovative as it imitates the immune systems response to infection. Source: I worked in immune oncology for years…

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