Health
Cancer vaccine shows promise
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Aug. 23, 2004
A new approach in cancer vaccine development that includes killing healthy skin cells to trigger a healing immune response was effective in eradicating skin tumors of mice, according to a research team from the Mayo Clinic and several British institutions. Their work appears in this month's Nature Biotechnology.
Multiple rounds of "heat shock" vaccine therapy inflicted a stress known as "inflammatory cell death" on skin cells to which researchers attached an unusual protein called heat shock protein 70. They were then able to trigger a healing immune response aimed at the skin cancer tumors that was so strong it eradicated the tumors.
Normally the destruction of healthy cells is avoided, as the goal of conventional toxic chemotherapy is to kill only the cancer cells.
"We hope our novel approach will be a more specific and therefore gentler therapy for patients," said Richard Vile, PhD, Mayo immunologist and lead researcher.
Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States, with an estimated 1 million new cases diagnosed annually.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2004/08/23/hlbf0823.htm.
