Finding a cure for cancer is a motivating force for many an aspiring doctor. Few get anywhere close to pursuing that goal. Among them is Dr. Catherine Wu, an oncologist at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who has had cancer in her sights since second grade, when a teacher asked her and her classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“That’s when there was a lot of coverage on the war on cancer,” she said. “I think I drew a picture of a cloud, probably a rainbow and drew a picture of (me) like, making a cure for cancer or something like that.”
That childhood scribble was prescient. Wu’s research has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual’s tumor. It’s a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of “decisive contributions” to cancer research.
Cancer treatment has “progressed over the years but there are still sort of a lot of unmet medical (needs) out there for many cancer forms,” said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize.
Sledgehammer cancer treatments
The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body’s immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells.
Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system. The work led to the 2018 Nobel Prize for medicine for Tasuku Honjo and James Allison, the latter a winner of the 2017 Sjöberg Prize.
These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don’t work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body’s immune system against cancer.
Wu’s fascination with the powers of the immune system arose after witnessing bone marrow transplants as a medical intern and seeing how they rebooted the blood and immune system to fight cancer.
“I had had really formative academic experiences that made me quite interested in the power of immunology,” she said. “There in front of my eyes were people who are being cured of their leukemia because of the mobilization of immune response.”
Wu’s research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what’s called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system’s T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack.
With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used “tour de force lab work” to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, Lendahl said.
“If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it’s pretty pointless,” Lendahl added.
Source : https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/20/health/cancer-vaccines-catherine-wu-scn/index.html