2023-09-12 04:59:43
Are we heading towards a “cancer vaccine”? A therapeutic vaccine against certain forms of lung cancer shows promising results, with a 40% reduction in the risk of death, according to a study published this Monday. But what do we really mean by this expression?
At the very beginning, Doctor Alexandra Leary spoke of “neoepitope injection”, before realizing that her patients understood less well, if not more poorly, that it was in fact a vaccination to help them in the recurrence of their ovarian tumor. It must be said that associating the words “vaccine” and “cancer” is far from simple: the combination is the result of research that has accelerated in just a few years.
On one side, the defiants; on the other, those who imagine an injection that would purely and simply prevent the onset of the disease. “There is pedagogy to be done, confirms Professor Claude-Agnès Reynaud, the president of the scientific council of the League against cancer. This is not a universal vaccine that would be administered preventively to the entire population to protect them from cancer, but rather a defense against it. »
Precision medicine
In short, a therapeutic vaccine, delivered to people who are already sick and – for the moment – often at an advanced stage of the disease, when several other treatments have failed. The only preventive injection currently proven is the anti-HPV (or papillomavirus) vaccination.
Therapeutic, therefore, but the fact remains that there is not a vaccine but many vaccines in development. “Mainly of three kinds”, specifies the onco-pneumologist Nicolas Girard. Shots based on messenger RNA, boosted by the Covid pandemic, being tested in particular against melanomas or pancreatic tumors. Classically designed injections based on small pieces of protein, eligible for a whole group of patients, as in the case of lung, cancer for which promising announcements were made this Monday.
Finally, “custom” or personalized vaccines, in the ENT sphere in particular, designed from the patient’s tumor, which we know will work for said patient but not for another. “Each has its qualities and its faults, notes Professor Girard, but all participate in the precision medicine of tomorrow. »
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