Cancer treatments that harness the body's immune system are greatly helping some patients. A small clinical study has found support for the cancer immunotherapy front.

In the study, a group of patients were injected with a vaccine designed to match specific mutations in their tumours, three patients with advanced melanoma had a strong immune response and tumours of two patients shrunk or stabilised temporarily. The study was meant to test safety of these vaccines. However, the results suggest the treatment halts growth of tumours. Several such studies have shown similar results fuelling hope for many.

How do cancer treatment vaccines work?

Antigens are substances the body thinks are harmful. These molecules are found on the surface of cells and the immune system attacks these antigens to get rid of them. The immune system then creates a memory that helps it fight the specific antigens again in the future.

Cancer treatment vaccines harness this ability and boost the immune system to find and destroy cancer-specific antigens that usually hide from the immune system. A vaccine delivers these molecules to a person’s body, which act as antigens.

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The immune system then finds and destroys these antigens and then learns how to find and destroy the cancer cells that have these molecules on their surface. Some cancer vaccines are personalised based on the DNA coding of the patients and mutation patterns of the tumours.

Such vaccines are currently available only in clinical trials, as per a cancer.net report.

Such vaccines are less toxic than chemotherapy and they might even prevent cancer from recurring after surgery. They can also be combined with other immunotherapy drugs as well.

Mark Lashway, who was part of cancer vaccine clinical trial, had skin cancer that spread to his lungs. The survival rate was only 15 percent.

However, seven years later, he is now seemingly cancer-free at the age of 67 after becoming one of the first people in the world to receive a personalised cancer vaccine. Three of his tumours were so big that he could feel them protruding through his back, the NewScientist reported. However, after a few months of the treatment, he had responded 100 percent to the vaccines and his tumours were well gone.

He is now one of a few hundred cancer patients who have received personalised vaccines as part of several clinical trials. Other participants of such trials also showed remarkable responses. Even patients with cancers that would be hard to treat conventionally were stable after the treatment.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)