Researchers: New Vaccine Shows Promise Against Colon Cancer

A new vacccine that enhances the body's own tumor-fighting abilities is showing promise for treating cancers including colon cancer, unlike other vaccines targeting cancer markers that have failed to generate enough of an immune response to be effective, according to researchers at Stanford University in California.

Researchers altered a protein called carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), a marker of common cancers, so that the body's immune cells would recognize it as foreign and attack it.

The researchers treated 12 patients with advanced colon or lung cancer, using a new drug to increase the number of tumor-fighting immune cells. They exposed the immune cells to the modified CEA protein and vaccinated the patients with their own immune cells two times, a month apart, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Out of the 12 patients, 7 showed a significant immune response to the vaccine. Five of the patients exhibited improvements in their cancers, with the vaccine slowing the tumor's spread to varying degrees in 3 patients and stopping the progression of the tumor in 2 patients.

"Given these promising results, additional clinical investigation is warranted to confirm and further characterize the effectiveness of our approach," wrote the authors.

Other sources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Reuters