A vaccine for lung cancer?
£1.7m grant awarded to research team hoping to develop ‘LungVax’, the world’s first vaccine to prevent lung cancer in people at high risk of the disease.
Cancer Research UK and the CRIS Cancer Foundation have awarded a grant to researchers at the University of Oxford, the Francis Crick Institute and University College London, who are working to develop a vaccine for lung cancer.
Photo by Robina Weermeijer
Vaccines aren’t new, of course. Traditionally, vaccines use part of a virus to train our bodies to battle a particular disease. Cancer vaccines work in a similar way, using neoantigens – harmless proteins from the surface of cancer cells, caused by the cancer-causing mutations in the cell’s DNA. The idea is develop a vaccine that can train the immune system to recognise these neoantigens as a danger and kill them, preventing the development of lung cancer.
With funding in place, the research team will conduct laboratory tests to see if the vaccine can successfully trigger a response from the immune system. If so, they’ll proceed to clinical trials. The funding agreed over the next two years will also cover the manufacture of an initial 3,000 doses of the new vaccine, produced by the Oxford Clinical BioManufacturing Facility.
If all goes well, the team hope to develop larger trials involving those at high risk of lung cancer, including people who already qualify for targeted checks on their lung health: those aged 55-74 who are or have been smokers. It’s though the vaccine has potential to cover some 90% of all lung cancers – and so has huge potential impact.
Professor Tim Elliott, Research Lead on LungVax, says: ‘Cancer is a disease of our own bodies and it’s hard for the immune system to distinguish between what’s normal and what’s cancer. Getting the immune system to recognise and attack cancer is one of the biggest challenges in cancer research today. If we can replicate the kind of success seen in trials during the pandemic, we could save the lives of tens of thousands of people every year in the UK alone.’
Professor Mariam Jamal-Hanjani from University College London and the Francis Crick Institute, who will be lead the clinical trial, adds: ‘Fewer than 10% of people with lung cancer survive their disease for 10 years or more. That must change. LungVax will not replace stopping smoking as the best way to reduce your risk of lung cancer. But it could offer a viable route to preventing some of the earliest stage cancers from emerging in the first place.’
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