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Scientists from the UK are working on the world’s first vaccine to prevent ovarian cancer
The vaccine is still in the development stage, but if trials are successful, it could help prevent one of the most common forms of cancer in women.
Scientists at Oxford University are working on the world’s first ovarian cancer vaccine to prevent the disease, which kills about 26,000 women in the European Union each year.
The vaccine, called OvarianVax, will teach the immune system to recognize and stop the early stages of ovarian cancer, one of the most common forms of cancer in women, which is often not detected until later stages when it is more difficult to treat.
The vaccine is focused on women with genetic mutations that increase their risk of developing ovarian cancer.
Some women with these mutations choose to have surgery to remove their ovaries and fallopian tubes to try to prevent cancer, but this prevents them from having children.
“We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer,” Dr. Ahmed Ahmed, an Oxford gynecologic oncologist and leader of the OvarianVax development project, said in a release. “Teaching the immune system to recognize the earliest signs of cancer is a challenge,” he added. “But now we have very advanced tools that give us a real insight into how the immune system recognizes ovarian cancer.”
Dr. Ahmed’s team intends to determine how well the immune system recognizes different proteins on the surface of ovarian cancer cells and will conduct laboratory tests to see how effectively the vaccine can kill organoids – tiny models of cancer grown from tumor tissue taken from patients.
If these early trials are successful, the researchers will begin clinical studies to test how well the vaccine works in humans.
The project could lead to “crucial discoveries in laboratory research that will realize our ambitions to improve survival in ovarian cancer,” Michelle Mitchell, executive director of the nonprofit organization Cancer Research UK, said.
Cancer Research UK will fund the OvarianVax study with up to £600,000, but warned that it could be “many years” before vaccines are available to patients.
It’s worth noting that other cancer vaccines are on the way.
It is expected that in the coming years, patients may also have vaccines to prevent other forms of cancer.
For example, Oxford scientists announced in March that they are working with pharmaceutical manufacturer AstraZeneca on a lung cancer vaccine using technology similar to that used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine.
Meanwhile, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can virtually eliminate cervical cancer in the next generation.
For example, since an HPV immunization campaign began in Scotland in 2008, there have been no cases of cervical cancer among women who were fully vaccinated at age 12 or 13.
Vaccines can also be used to treat people already suffering from cancer. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is conducting a clinical trial of personalized vaccines targeting specific mutations in thousands of cancer patients.
As part of this trial, patients have tumors removed during surgery and are then injected with a personalized vaccine that researchers believe will trigger an immune response to recognize and destroy any remaining cancer cells.
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