Study instructs how to design new, more powerful vaccine formulas for cancer

Cancer vaccines that attempt to stimulate an immune system assault fail because the killer T cells aimed at tumors instead find the vaccination site a more inviting target, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in Nature Medicine. A common substance used in many cancer vaccines to boost immune attack betrays the cause by facilitating a build-up of T cells at the vaccination site, which then summon more T cells to help with the perceived threat. “Vaccines stimulate production of T cells primed to attack the target cancer, and there are many T cells in the bloodstream after vaccination. We found that only a few get to the tumor while many more are stuck at or double back to the vaccination site,” said senior author Willem Overwijk, Ph.D., in MD Anderson’s Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology. The result: largely unscathed tumors while an overstimulated immune response can cause lesions...