Stopping cancer before it starts
Vaccines offer one of medicine’s most desirable solutions: they prevent disease from ever occurring. Effective vaccines for various cancers would be revolutionary, and there have already been successes in this area. Now a group led by Giorgio Inghirami at the University of Torino, Italy, has developed a vaccination that protects mice from local and systemic lymphoma growth as reported in Nature Medicine (May 11, 2008).
Using JAX® Mice, the researchers used DNA for a protein that is essential for the growth of certain lymphomas, called ALK, for the vaccine. It provided a strong immune system response and, in the scientists’ words, the “protection is potent and long lasting.” And because high ALK levels are present in only a few central nervous system tissues in mammals after early development, few if any autoimmune reactions are expected from the vaccine.
Current chemotherapy treatments for high-grade lymphoma in children are associated with failure and high toxicity. Combining a vaccine with less toxic chemotherapy protocols has the potential to offer better quality of life during treatment and better outcomes.
