Can Cancer Vaccine plus Nanotechnology Stop Cancer?

Cancer scientists have been working on cancer vaccines for decades. Presently there is active development work for vaccines against prostate cancer, breast cancer, leukemia, cervical cancer, and others.

This newsrelease discusses recent work at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, in isolating a useful tumor antigen that is more accessible to the immune system T cells than many more elusive tumor antigens.

The researchers have identified a short peptide molecule that the T cell in the study recognises. Using this peptide, the researchers can vaccinate and protect against the spread of tumours from different tissues, including melanoma, colon cancer, lymphoma, and fibrosarcoma.

"So far we've only conducted research on mice, so it's too early to get out hopes up too much," says research scientist Elisabeth Wolpert at the Microbiology and Tumour Biology Centre. "However, the study does point towards new possible ways of developing a treatment for advanced tumour diseases."

Nanotechnology is also being brought into the fight, to aid cancer vaccine research. The US National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Center for Cancer Research, is using nanotechnology in several ways.

CCR’s Nanobiology Program (CCRNP) promotes multidisciplinary research that leads to the development of tools for nanoscale, biologically based strategies to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer, AIDS, and biodefense-related viral diseases. The CCRNP works to understand the structure and function of biomolecules to aid in the design of nanodevices for in vivo imaging, diagnostics, and targeted drug delivery systems.

Principle investigators who are active in the program have several areas of interest, including membrane structure and function, protein interactions, biomedical image and database analysis, structural bioinformatics, structural glycobiology, molecular information theory, and computational RNA structure.

CCRNP investigators have formed collaborative partnerships with CCR investigators in other programs, labs, and branches, including the Molecular Imaging Program, the Radiation Oncology Branch, the Laboratory of Cell Biology, and the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry.

Using nanoparticles to "tag" dendritic cells, cancer researchers can keep better track of those important immune system cells.

In a later posting, I will discuss oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, and how they may relate to cancer vaccines.