Clapper, Patti, Schweizer and Mason

For decades scientists have hoped to find a vaccine that could help prevent patients from developing mesothelioma, a deadly form of cancer, after being exposed to asbestos.  However, that dream has been mostly fantasy until now.

New research from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Georgia has led scientists to develop a vaccine that has shown amazing promise in laboratory settings.

Tests involving mice indicate that the new vaccine activates the subjects’ own immune system to specifically target cancer cells.  If this procedure can jump the species gap it may hold the key to developing a mesothelioma vaccine for humans.

The two major benefits of having such a vaccine would be 1) keeping patients from developing the disease altogether, and 2) having a weapon that attacks only cancer cells.  Up until recently, the most accepted method for treating mesothelioma has been to use traditional cancer treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.  Unfortunately, all of those treatments carry with them significant side effects and damage healthy tissue along with diseased tissue.  A targeted immunological vaccine would eliminate those risks.

The key to making this vaccine work lay in how the body recognizes dangers.  The immune system typically recognizes and attacks invading organisms such as bacteria and viruses.  However, because cancerous tumors are composed of the body’s own cells, the immune system does not typically recognize them as a threat.  This new vaccine, in effect, paints the tumors as a target and allows the immune cells to do all the heavy lifting.

It does this by identifying a specific protein which is “overexpressed” in mesothelioma tumors:  MUC1.  This protein then acts as a marker which enables the body to delineate between healthy cells and damaged ones.

Lead researcher Sandra Gendler of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona said that this is a completely new technique and that “this is the first time that a vaccine has been developed that trains the immune system to distinguish and kill cancer cells based on their different sugar structures on proteins such as MUC1.”

However, if a vaccine can be developed, it may not be only mesothelioma patients that will benefit.  Previous research by the National Cancer Institute has shown that the MUC1 protein is overexpressed in up to 70 percent of lethal cancers.  This means that a vaccine targeting MUC1 may be useful in eliminating certain types of breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, and more.

Research is progressing swiftly and Phase I clinical trials involving humans may begin as soon as 2013.