The vaccines are still in their early stages of development, but if trials are successful, they could help prevent one of the most common forms of cancer in women.
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Scientists at the University of Oxford are working on the first vaccine against ovarian cancer in the world, with the aim of preventing the disease that kills almost 26,000 women in the European Union every year.
The vaccine, called OvarianVax, would train the immune system to recognize and fight the early stages of ovarian cancer, one of the most common forms of cancer among women who often not detected until a later stage when it is most difficult to treat.
The vaccine will be targeted at women with genetic mutations that may increase the risk of ovarian cancer.
Some women with these mutations choose surgery to remove the ovaries and fallopian tubes to try to prevent cancer, although prevents them from having children.
“We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer”Dr. Ahmed Ahmed, a gynecological oncologist at Oxford and director of the OvarianVax project, said in a statement.
“Teach the immune system to recognize the first signs of cancer It’s a difficult challenge“he added. “But now we have very sophisticated tools that give us real information about how the immune system recognizes ovarian cancer.”
Ahmed’s team will try to determine how well the immune system recognizes different proteins on the surface of ovarian cancer cells and will conduct laboratory tests to measure how well the vaccine can kill organoids, which are small models of cancer grown from tumor tissue taken from patients.
If these first tests are successful, the researchers will move forward with clinical trials to test how well the vaccine works in people.
The project could lead to “crucial discoveries in the laboratory that will realize our ambitions for improve survival to ovarian cancer,” Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of the nonprofit Cancer Research UK, said in a statement.
Cancer Research UK to fund OvarianVax research with up to 600,000 pounds sterling (719,960 euros) and warned that it could still be “many years” before vaccines are available to patients.
More cancer vaccines are on the way
Vaccines to prevent other forms of cancer could also reach patients in the coming years.
In March, for example, Oxford scientists announced that they were working on a vaccine for lung cancerusing technology similar to that used to develop its COVID-19 vaccine with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Meanwhile, the vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV) could almost eliminate cervical cancer in the next generation.
Since Scotland launched its immunization campaign against HPV in 2008, For example, there have been no cases of cervical cancer among women who were fully vaccinated at age 12 or 13.
Vaccines could also come to treat people who already have cancer. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is carrying out a clinical trial to test personalized vaccines that target specific mutations in thousands of cancer patients.
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For that study, patients have their tumors removed by surgery before receiving a personalized vaccine that researchers They hope it will provoke an immune response to recognize and destroy any remaining cancer cells.
