The treatment "has broad implications for multiple types of cancer," said lead author, Dr. Joshua Brody, director of the lymphoma immunotherapy program. "This method could also increase the success of other immunotherapies such as checkpoint blockade." Researchers said some patients in the initial human trial went into full remission for months or even years. Researchers at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital tested the treatment in 11 patients with lymphoma. Their results were successful enough to warrant another clinical trial in March on lymphoma patients as well as breast and head-and-neck cancer. An experimental cancer "vaccine" showed promising results in a small clinical trial of patients with lymphoma, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. They refer to it as a vaccine because it causes a person's immune system to fight the disease, though it's not preventive like the flu shot. In this case, the treatment teaches the body to recognize tumors and attack them. Researchers created the treatment directly inside the tumor. To do this, they injected one tumor with a stimulant to recruit immune cells, treated the tumor with a low dose of radiation then injected it with a stimulant to activate immune cells. These activated immune cells then travel throughout the body, killing tumors wherever they find them. For more on investing in health-care innovation, click here to join CNBC at our Healthy Returns Summit in New York City on May 21. In three of the patients, the treatment shrunk not only the tumor that was treated but also other ones throughout the body, putting these patients into remission. "It's really promising, and the fact you get not only responses in treated areas, but areas outside the field [of treatment with radiation] is really significant," said Dr. Silvia Formenti, chairwoman of radiation oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, who was not involved in the study and is working on a similar treatment. While promising, the effect was observed in only three people and will need to be tested in larger trials before even going before the Food and Drug Administration for review. Dr. Eric Jacobsen, clinical director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's lymphoma program, said the results are exciting but cautioned more research needs to be done. Jacobsen was not involved in the study. "It's definitely proof of concept, but larger studies are definitely needed and additional strategies to try to get more than three out of 11 patients to respond," said Jacobsen, who is also developing a lymphoma vaccine, though with a slightly different approach. Researchers for decades have tried but failed to create cancer vaccines. New research on immunotherapy, or training a person's immune system to fight disease, has reinvigorated their efforts. The vaccine activates dendritic cells, which are responsible for initiating immune responses. These cells then instruct T-cells to attack tumors in a person's body, like generals instructing soldiers how to fight. "Generals don't really fight wars, they make the plans," Brody said. The research was funded by The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, the Cancer Research Institute and Merck. Celldex and Oncovir provided the materials for the clinical trial and the lab work. Correction: This story was revised to correct a quote from Dr. Formenti. She said "treated," not "three." WATCH: Pfizer's bet on cancer market uncertain<doc-sep>A new cancer "vaccine" that's injected directly into a single tumor can trigger the immune system to attack cancer cells throughout the body, a small new study suggests. The researchers say that the experimental therapy essentially turns tumors into "cancer vaccine factories," where immune cells learn to recognize the cancer before seeking it out and destroying it in other parts of the body. "[We're] seeing tumors all throughout the body melting away" after injecting just one tumor, said lead study author Dr. Joshua Brody, director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Still, the research, published today (April 8) in the journal Nature Medicine, is very preliminary. The therapy has only been tested in 11 patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a cancer of immune system cells), and not all of these patients responded to the treatment. But some patients did have remission for relatively long periods, and the results were promising enough that the therapy is now also being tested in patients with breast and head and neck cancers, the authors said. [7 Odd Things That Raise Your Risk of Cancer (and 1 That Doesn't)] What's more, the "vaccine" appears to substantially boost the effectiveness of another type of immunotherapy called "checkpoint blockade" — the same therapy that former President Jimmy Carter received to treat his metastatic melanoma in 2015. ("Immunotherapy" refers to treatments that harness the immune system to fight cancer.) The two therapies "are remarkably synergistic," Brody told Live Science. So far, the researchers have only tested the combined therapies in mice, but they are optimistic that the combined therapies could benefit cancer patients, particularly those that aren't getting much benefit from current immunotherapy treatments. Cancer ''vaccine'' To be clear, the new treatment is not technically a vaccine — a term used for substances that provide long-lasting immunity against disease. (Still, the term "cancer vaccine" can be used to refer to therapies that train the immune system to fight cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.) Instead, the new treatment is a type of immunotherapy. It involves giving patients a series of injections with two types of immune stimulants. The therapy has three steps. First, patients are given an injection that contains a small molecule that recruits immune cells, called dendritic cells, into the tumor. Dendritic cells act like generals in an army, telling the immune system "soldiers" — known as T cells — what to do, Brody said. Next, patients are given a low dose of radiotherapy, which kills a few tumor cells so that they spill out "antigens," or proteins, that the immune system can learn to recognize, Brody said. Dendritic cells then take up these antigens and show them to the T cells. Then, patients are given a second injection that contains a molecule that activates the dendritic cells. "The dendritic cells are learning the lesson … and telling it to the T cells," which then can search the body for other cancer cells, Brody said. Synergistic therapies? In the new study, many of the 11 lymphoma patients saw a regression of their tumors that lasted for months to years. But several patients didn't benefit from the therapy. The researchers were also interested to see how their therapy worked with checkpoint blockade drugs, which essentially take the "brakes" off T cells so they better attack cancer cells. While this therapy can work well for some types of cancer (indeed, President Carter had complete remission after his checkpoint blockade treatment), it doesn't work well for others, including non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. When the researchers gave checkpoint blockade drugs to mice with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the treatment, not surprisingly, had no effect. But when they gave it in combination with their vaccine, about 75% of the mice went into long-term remission. The type of therapy tested in the new study is known as "in situ vaccination," because it involves injections directly into tumor cells. It isn't the first experimental "in situ" cancer vaccine — in 2018, researchers reported promising results of another in situ vaccine in mice. But the new treatment is different because it focuses on dendritic cells rather than T cells. The authors think "this could be … effective for many cancer types that are so far not benefiting much from cancer immunotherapy," Brody said. Dr. Mark Mulligan, director of the NYU Langone Vaccine Center, who wasn't involved with the study, said the new findings appear promising. Figuring out how to harness checkpoint blockade drugs for more cancer types "is an important area of ongoing research," Mulligan told Live Science. The data presented in mice, and early data from the human trial, "appear promising" in terms of enhancing the effect of checkpoint blockade treatments, he said. Still, Mulligan cautioned that the new study is the "earliest phase" of human testing, and that larger, more rigorous studies will now be needed to confirm the methods' safety and effectiveness. Dr. Pallawi Torka, an assistant professor of oncology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, who specializes in lymphoma, agreed the results are "preliminary yet promising." New immunotherapy approaches for treating non-Hodgkin's lymphomas are "sorely needed," said Torka, who was not involved with the new research. The effectiveness of the study approach is "welcome news," especially given the dramatic improvement seen in the mouse study when the treatment was combined with checkpoint blockade, she told Live Science. But Torka noted that the treatment approach used in the study is "quite cumbersome." Patients received nine daily injections of the first immune stimulant, followed by two doses of radiotherapy, and then eight injections of the second immune stimulant. "The next set of experiments will need to focus on simplifying, combining and reducing the number of steps needed" so that the approach could be tested at a number of medical sites, rather than a few specialized cancer centers, Torka said. Editor's note: This story was updated at 4:15 p.m. ET to include comments from Dr. Pallawi Torka. Originally published on Live Science.<doc-sep>Some treated patients experienced full remission for months or even years. Trained to Kill By injecting immune stimulants directly into cancerous tumors, researchers from Mount Sinai say they’ve transformed the growths into “cancer vaccine factories” that produce cancer-killing immune cells — and their approach was so successful in fighting one type of cancer that they’re already testing it on two others. The treatment starts with the injection of two immune stimulants directly into a tumor. The first stimulant recruits immune cells called dendritic cells, while the second activates the dendritic cells, prompting them to instruct the immune system’s T cells to kill cancer cells while leaving non-cancer cells unharmed. Once trained in this way, the immune system’s cells can venture out to other parts of the body, killing tumor cells wherever they encounter them. Factory of Life According to the team’s study, which was published in the journal Nature Medicine on Monday, the researchers already tested the therapy on 11 patients with advanced stage lymphoma in a clinical trial. Afterwards, some of those patients experienced full remission for months or even years. Advertisement Advertisement This success has led to two additional clinical trials, this time in patients with either breast or head and neck cancer. “The in situ vaccine approach has broad implications for multiple types of cancer,” researcher Joshua Brody said in a press release. “This method could also increase the success of other immunotherapies such as checkpoint blockade.” READ MORE: Mount Sinai Researchers Develop Treatment That Turns Tumors Into Cancer Vaccine Factories [Mount Sinai] More on cancer: Chinese Doctors Are Using Modified T-Cells to Treat Advanced Forms of Cancer Advertisement Advertisement As a Futurism reader, we invite you join the Singularity Global Community, our parent company’s forum to discuss futuristic science & technology with like-minded people from all over the world. It’s free to join, sign up now!<doc-sep>The classic treatments for cancer include chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. These can be very effective, but doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York led by Linda Hammerich, Ph.D., and Joshua Brody, M.D., explored a much more radical approach and saw that their boldness paid off. Their new cancer treatment trains the body to fight its own tumors, and as they reported Monday in Nature Medicine, it’s led to significant remissions in several human patients. The doctors have described the treatment as turning the tumors into “cancer vaccine factories,” which train the patients’ immune system to detect and fight the tumors themselves. They tested it on 11 patients with indolent non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, an incurable type of cancer that originates in white blood cells. Unlike preventative vaccines, this one is therapeutic, which means it doesn’t prevent cancer but treats it. “We were whatever the thing is right between delighted and surprised — but mostly delighted,” the study’s lead author Joshua Brody, M.D., director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at Mount Sinai, tells Inverse. Recruiting the Immune “Army” The new therapy works by recruiting dendritic cells, a type of immune cell, into a cancerous tumor by injecting it with molecules designed to stimulate the immune system. Dendritic cells are the ones that will corral the rest of the immune system into killing a tumor. “Dendritic cells are a very big deal, but a weirdly neglected big deal,” says Brody. He likens the immune system to an army, in which T cells — cells produced as part of the body’s immune response — are the soldiers, and dendritic cells are the generals. To harness the potential of the whole army, Brody’s team had to figure out how to provide the dendritic cells with the information they needed to send the T cells to attack tumors. Once the dendritic cells are introduced into the tumors, they’ve been recruited into the fight. Then, the patients receive low-dose radiotherapy, which kills enough tumor cells to release antigens, proteins that the immune system can recognize and fight. Antigens are produced by most infectious diseases, triggering our bodies to produce antibodies to fight back. Usually, tumors go more or less undetected by our immune systems, since they’re just mutated versions of our own cells. But by priming the tumors with the dendritic cells, damaged tumor cells will produce antigens that the body can learn to attack. “At the end of it, what you have is the dendritic cell that gets the antigen on it, shouting orders to the T cells, saying, ‘Go look for this antigen all over the body!’” explains Brody. A Successful Battle And that’s exactly what happened for some of the patients. Three of the patients went into remission, while six patients had minor regressions that lasted between three and 18 months. In the PET scan below, the level of remission is clear: “you don’t need to be a radiologist to understand it,” says Brody. One patient's PET scans show just how significant the reduction in tumors was six months after treatment. Nature/ Hammerich et al Perhaps most importantly, this therapy didn’t just work on the tumors that were injected; it also worked on tumors in other parts of the body. This suggests the immune response successfully trained the body’s T cells to treat the cancer like a disease to fight it off. “It’s really promising, and the fact you get not only responses in treated areas, but areas outside the field [of treatment with radiation] is really significant,” Dr. Silvia Formenti, chair of radiation oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, who was not involved in the study, told CNBC. Next steps will involve combining this immunotherapy with checkpoint blockade therapy, a cancer treatment that helps T cells attack cancer even more aggressively. In the new study, this combination showed a 75-percent success rate in mice, but Brody’s team has just begun testing it in human patients with lymphoma, breast cancer, and head and neck cancers. For more information about becoming part of that clinical trial, visit the team’s clinical trial registry. Brody, for one, is extremely optimistic about the combination of checkpoint blockade and the therapeutic vaccine therapy. “If the benefit in our patients is as profound as the synergy in the animal models,” he says, “we expect great results.” Abstract: Indolent non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas (iNHLs) are incurable with standard therapy and are poorly responsive to checkpoint blockade. Although lymphoma cells are efficiently killed by primed T cells, in vivo priming of anti-lymphoma T cells has been elusive. Here, we demonstrate that lymphoma cells can directly prime T cells, but in vivo immunity still requires cross-presentation. To address this, we developed an in situ vaccine (ISV), combining Flt3L, radiotherapy, and a TLR3 agonist, which recruited, antigen-loaded and activated intratumoral, cross-presenting dendritic cells (DCs). ISV induced anti-tumor CD8+ T cell responses and systemic (abscopal) cancer remission in patients with advanced stage iNHL in an ongoing trial (NCT01976585). Non-responding patients developed a population of PD1+CD8+ T cells after ISV, and murine tumors became newly responsive to PD1 blockade, prompting a follow-up trial of the combined therapy. Our data substantiate that recruiting and activating intratumoral, cross-priming DCs is achievable and critical to anti-tumor T cell responses and PD1-blockade efficacy.<doc-sep>
Scientists have developed a cancer “vaccine” that can help trigger your immune system to attack cancer cells in your body, according to the results of a small but promising new study. The study, which was published in the journal Nature Medicine, investigated the results of the treatment in 11 patients with lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes and lymphatic system. While not all of the patients responded to the treatment, some went into full remission for months or years after receiving the “vaccine.” "What makes this study so exciting and important is that it further reinforces the fact that immunotherapy is likely to be more effective when you use a combination approach," says Anton Bilchik, MD, PhD, a professor of surgery and chief of medicine at John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif. "The fact that this vaccine is allowing the other immune mechanisms to fight cancer is very, very exciting." What is a cancer “vaccine,” exactly? While this is being called a “vaccine,” it actually doesn’t prevent someone from developing cancer, says study coauthor Joshua Brody, MD, director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This is a therapeutic vaccine, not a preventative vaccine, i.e. it is used to treat people that already have the disease,” he says. While the "vaccine" was tested on lymphoma patients, Dr. Brody says his lab has already seen it work on other types of tumors. How does the “vaccine” work? The “vaccine” works by injecting two immune stimulants directly into a tumor. That 'tricks' the immune system into thinking that the tumor is like an infection,” Dr. Brody says. “Then, the activated immune cells travel throughout the body to kill tumors wherever they find them.” Another way to describe it is that the vaccine follows three steps: First, the treatment is injected into the tumor. Then, the tumor is treated with a low dose of radiation. Finally, it’s injected with another stimulant that activates the immune cells (which then go through the body and kill other tumors). It’s worth noting that this effect only put three of the 11 patients into remission, but researchers are hoping to increase its effectiveness in future trials. The “vaccine” also seems to boost the effectiveness of a form of immunotherapy called a checkpoint blockade (which received the 2018 Nobel Prize). “Checkpoint blockade 'releases the brakes' from anti-cancer immune cells so they can kill more effectively, but it doesn't generate or 'prime' anti-cancer immune cells,” Dr. Brody says. “Therefore a combination of the cancer ‘vaccine’ plus checkpoint blockade appears much more effective than either therapy alone.” Where does the “vaccine” go from here? Dr. Brody and his team are doing another clinical trial using the “vaccine” on additional patients with lymphoma, as well as patients with breast and head and neck cancers. They’re also testing the combination of the cancer “vaccine” with checkpoint blockades. This won’t be widely available to cancer patients anytime soon (it will have to go through a rigorous FDA approval first), and more research is needed to try to make the “vaccine” effective for more people. Still, it’s promising. Stay updated on the latest science-backed health, fitness, and nutrition news by signing up for the Prevention.com newsletter here.