Genome Engineering

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. It is generally a slow growing form of cancer, though some men have a more aggressive form of the disease. Conventional management of prostate cancer includes ‘watch and wait’, surgery or radio-or chemotherapy. Animal studies of a prostate cancer DNA vaccine have suggested a new approach to cancer treatment that may have potential to stabilise or cure tumours.

Syringe

DNA and gene therapy vaccines have often just used DNA coding for just one antigen, but cancer cells express a wide range of antigens and it can be hard to select the right one. In this project, the researchers created a vaccine using DNA coding for a wide range of proteins. This cDNA library was sourced from healthy prostate cells, reducing the risk of an immune response against any other cells in the body, and was delivered via a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). A course of nine vaccinations cured 80% of mice with prostate tumours, with few side effects.

Though this has not yet been studied in humans, this approach gives cancer patients and doctors hope, and could have potential in other tumours. Animal studies in melanoma are under way.

The team behind the research, published in Nature Medicine, included researchers from the Mayo Clinic, USA, and the University of Leeds, UK, St. George’s Hospital Medical School, UK, the University of Surrey, UK, and the Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK, with support from Cancer Research UK, the National Institutes of Health and other funding bodies.