Adrian Liston Says More Than 100 Cancer Vaccine Trials Are Underway
More than 100 cancer vaccine trials are underway, and many use the mRNA technology that helped power Covid shots. Adrian Liston, an immunologist and professor of pathology at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s really exciting. People are starting to realise just how important the immune system is.”
He called it “the era of immunology.” The shift comes after immunotherapy trials rose from 1,257 between 2006 and 2016 to 4,591 in the past decade, while dozens of treatments gained approval for more than 30 types of cancer.
Adrian Liston on immunology
Cancer vaccines are designed to stimulate the immune system to attack tumours. They are part of a broader group of immunotherapies that also includes checkpoint inhibitors, antibody-based medicines, engineered immune cells and lab-made antibodies.
Liston’s comments sit inside a field that has moved quickly. Cancer patients have seen major benefits from immunotherapies, and the growth in trial numbers shows how far the research has spread beyond a few experimental studies.
Samra Turajlić on tumours
Samra Turajlić, director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and head of the cancer dynamics laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said: “We increasingly see cancer as something that’s shaped by the immune system,”
That view matches the 2018 case in which doctors treated a woman with metastatic breast cancer by harvesting immune cells from her tumours, growing billions of them in the lab and putting the most potent ones back into her bloodstream. Car-T-cell therapy works by engineering patients’ immune cells to hunt down cancer cells.
Sam Neill and the next study
Last month, Sam Neill said he was cancer free after having Car-T-cell therapy for stage 3 blood cancer as part of a trial. His case shows how trial results are already reaching patients, even as the wider field keeps testing which approaches work best for different cancers.
A four-year study launched last week will recruit thousands of patients with breast, bladder, kidney and skin cancer to learn why some patients do well and others barely respond to cancer immunotherapies. For patients, the near-term takeaway is simple: the field is no longer limited to one type of treatment, and the next round of trial results will shape which cancer vaccines and other immunotherapies move forward.
