State-of-the art tumour-genome sequencing and analysis is enabling researchers to provide uniquely personalized immunotherapy. This can be combined with another form of immunotherapy — checkpoint inhibition, which stops tumours from suppressing immune-system activity — to make personalized cancer vaccination feasible.


cancer-immunotherapy


Cancer is famous for its ability to deceive, appearing to the immune system as normal tissue while wreaking destruction on the body. But what if cancer cells had ‘tells’ — subtle but unmistakable characteristics that revealed their true nature?

A growing number of scientists say that neoantigens, which are peptides (fragments of proteins) found only on the surface of cancer cells, could be those tells. They are working to develop vaccines that use neoantigens to help a patients own immune systems fight tumours.

DNA sequencing is at the heart of this approach, which requires identifying mutations unique to cancer cells (i.e. mutations in the cancer that are not present in the same patients healthy cells). With RNA sequencing used to determine whether these mutant proteins are expressed in the tumor. This information is then used together patients immune system HLA information (also from sequencing) to develop vaccines personally optimized for that patient.

Read more about the recent exciting advances in this field in this Nature Outlook article from late Dec 2017