Name: Thousands of cancer patients to trial personalised vaccines in England | BBC News
Uploaded: 2024-09-03T04:56:29.000Z
Duration: 6 min 11 s
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Thousands of cancer patients across England will be invited to take part in new trials of a treatment using personalised vaccines.

The scheme, known as the Cancer Vaccine Launchpad, will match NHS patients with suitable studies across the country.

Our medical editor Fergus Walsh explains more.

Elliot was diagnosed with bowel cancer last year and has already had surgery and chemotherapy.

But tests show he still has fragments of cancerous DNA in his blood, putting him at increased risk of his cancer coming back.

So he's signed up to a trial at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital of a new type of treatment, a cancer vaccine.

I did a bit of research about the treatment trial itself and if it's successful then it's a medical breakthrough, a time of reckoning.

And this is the key moment when Elliot receives his vaccine, tailor made in Germany by pharma company BioNTech, to fight his cancer.

He'll get up to 15 doses during the trial.

Elliot's personalised vaccine uses the same mRNA technology as found in current Covid jabs.

A sample of Elliot's tumour was analysed and proteins unique to his cancer were identified.

The mRNA vaccine instructs his cells to produce these rogue proteins.

The hope is this will stimulate Elliot's immune system to recognise and kill any remaining traces of cancer.

Elliot is the first patient in the UK to get the bowel cancer vaccine.

He's had only mild side effects but will be carefully monitored like more than 200 other participants in the international trial.

The science behind this and my hope is that this will become standard of care.

It just makes sense that we can have something that can actually help in addition to help patients reduce the risk of cancer recurrence.

There is huge anticipation about the potential of personalised vaccines to treat cancer.

But it all depends on the outcome of trials like Elliot's with thousands more NHS patients across England expected to be recruited to similar studies targeting lung, breast and other tumour types.

And let's speak now to Peter Johnson who is the National Cancer Lead for NHS England.

Peter, thank you very much for joining us to talk about this development.

Yes, these vaccines look very promising as a way of stopping people's cancer coming back after they've had an operation.

We know that one of the big worries with cancer is that even though we're catching it at an early stage in more and more people, nonetheless there are sometimes some cells left behind.

And what this technology does is it looks at the molecular changes, the mutations that are particular to everybody's cancer cell, analyses those and then makes a vaccine.

We make a vaccine that specifically targets the immune system onto that.

Now, the complicated bit about that, of course, is that we need to make sure that we get somebody's bit of cancer that they're having removed in the operating theatre, get out the DNA so that we can analyse the mutations in all the genes in the cells and turn that into a vaccine.

And that's something that needs to be done quite quickly, obviously, because you need to be able to give people the vaccine before the cancer cells grow back again.

And therefore, we've been setting up this system in the NHS to try and streamline that as much as possible.

And in particular, to make sure that the processing of people's cancer samples in all the different hospitals where they might be having these operations is done as efficiently as possible, even before they get to the stage of potentially taking part in the trial.

And that's what our cancer vaccine launchpad is aimed at doing.

And presumably, if someone is going through treatment for cancer or has been going through treatment for cancer, their immune system is perhaps not working as fully, as ably as it would in someone who is completely healthy.

So this treatment, therefore, I presume, is designed to really boost their immune system, send it into a bit of overdrive, if you like, to really fight off any traces of the cancer.

Yes, cancers are very good at getting under the radar of the immune system, and that's how they grow in the first place.

But what we've started to see from the early results of these trials is that it is possible to lock the immune system back onto these molecular abnormalities in the cancer cells.

And what we're obviously doing now is trying to make sure that we can do these trials as quickly as possible, make sure that we've got the systems in place to allow as many people as possible to take part in the trials as they start to come through, and really importantly, make sure that if the results are good and we do want to turn this into a treatment that we use regularly, that the NHS is in the best possible position to make that a reality.

And Peter, at the end of Fergus's report, he was talking about the possibility of this treatment being used to tackle other forms of cancer.

How far advanced is the process or the process of looking at that, I guess, is what I'm trying to figure out?

Yes, this current trial is for people with bowel cancer, having operations for that.

There's a lot of other cancer types where we think it might be effective, those types of cancer where we've been using other sorts of immune treatment in the last few years, such as bladder cancer, lung cancer, some types of breast cancer.

And what we're doing at the moment is trying to make sure that in the healthcare system in the UK, we can make it as possible to do these trials as quickly as possible for whichever companies are wanting to do them.

OK, Peter Johnson, NHS England's National Cancer Lead.

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Thousands of cancer patients to trial personalised vaccines in England | BBC News

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