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A revolutionary 'super vaccine' could potentially give people immunity against cancer before tumours ever have a chance to grow and spread.
Scientists in Massachusetts say their experimental jab has successfully prevented several aggressive forms of cancer in laboratory tests, including melanoma, pancreatic cancer, and triple-negative breast cancer.
The vaccine uses tiny nanoparticles made from fatty molecules to deliver two 'adjuvants,' which are substances that amplify the body's immune response against cancer cells.
In the laboratory trials with mice, up to 88 percent of those injected with the nanoparticle vaccine remained tumour-free, depending on the type of cancer they had.
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The vaccine also reduced, and in some cases completely stopped, cancer from spreading throughout the body, a process known as metastasis.
So far, the vaccine has only been tested in mice and it's unclear when or if the treatment could become available for humans. However, this is something that the team is working towards.
The experiments at UMass Amherst initially combined nanoparticles with an 'antigen' that triggers an immune response to cancer. Mice that received the injection were then exposed to melanoma, an aggressive skin cancer that can spread to virtually any organ in the body.
The shocking results revealed that 80 percent of the mice that received the nanoparticle vaccine remained tumour–free and survived for 250 days. On the other hand, all the mice that received traditional vaccines or no vaccine at all developed tumours and died within just 35 days.
In another case, the team tested a modified version of the vaccine using nanoparticles combined with a different antigen called tumour lysate.
Mice vaccinated with this version were later exposed to three different aggressive cancers: melanoma, triple-negative breast cancer, or pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) - the most common and deadly type of pancreatic cancer.
The results varied by cancer type but remained impressive. Specifically, 88 per cent of mice with pancreatic cancer stayed tumour-free, as well as the 75 percent with breast cancer and 69 percent with melanoma.
Even more encouragingly, all mice that remained tumour-free also resisted developing secondary cancerous growths when exposed to cancer cells again, suggesting that the vaccine provides lasting protection.
Study author Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UMass Amherst, had previously demonstrated that her nanoparticle-based drug design could shrink or eliminate existing tumours in mice.
But the newly published findings show that this approach can also prevent cancer from forming in the first place.
"The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps," co–author Griffin Kane at UMass Amherst told 404 Media.
"But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams."
