Traditional cancer treatments, primarily cytotoxic drugs, kill both cancerous and normal cells, leading to significant side effects such as increased susceptibility to infections, hair loss, and nausea. This approach is more effective in cases of advanced cancer where tumor burden is high. In contrast, therapeutic cancer vaccines represent a newer class of targeted therapies aimed specifically at malignant cells, resulting in less toxicity. These vaccines seek to train the patient's immune system to fight cancer by using tumor-specific antigens. Recent advancements have focused on personalized vaccines that utilize unique antigens from the patient's own tumor cells, enhancing the specificity of the immune response. Several methods for developing personalized cancer vaccines include: 1. **Dendritic Cell-Based Therapy**: This involves stimulating the patient's dendritic cells with tumor antigens outside the body, then reintroducing them to present the antigens to T cells, activating the immune response. 2. **Irradiated Tumor Cells**: This method involves irradiating the patient’s tumor cells to eliminate their harmful properties and then mixing them with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) to stimulate the immune system. 3. **Heat Shock Protein Peptide Complexes**: Heat shock proteins, which help in protein folding and transport within cells, are being explored for their role in presenting antigenic peptides to prime the immune system. These innovative treatments aim to provide a more effective and less toxic approach to cancer therapy.
Personalized Cancer Vaccine
by Bhuvan Raval 
in
English Health
Description
Traditional cancer drugs are cytotoxic agents, meaning that they kill cells. Although most chemotherapeutics preferentially affect rapidly dividing cells (i.e., cancer cells) they can not differentiate between malignant and normal cells. The unavoidable toxicity to normal cells often results in treatment-related toxicities such as increased susceptibility to bleeding and infection, mucositis, nausea and vomiting, hair loss, etc. This nonspecific approach to cancer treatment makes it more suitable for use in disease settings in which the tumor burden is high, such as advanced or metastatic disease. This article covers therapeutic cancer vaccines which belong to a newer class of targeted cancer therapies. Like innovative treatments such as Gleevec Herceptin. Most cancer vaccines in development are designed to attack only malignant cells. By targeting tumor cells with high specificity, this new class of treatments tends to be associated with less toxicity compared with traditional cancer drugs. Despite the varied approaches employed by the many therapeutic cancer vaccines in development, they all share one fundamental goal: to program a patient’s immune system to attack the patient’s cancer. Some vaccines utilize antigens (any substance capable of stimulating an immune response) that are known to be associated with certain types of tumors. In recent years, there was an increased interest on so-called unique antigens that are products of random mutations arising in the course of tumor cells’ uncontrolled cell divisions. These led researchers’ interest and work on personalized cancer vaccines that use the patients’ own tumor cells to generate immune response specific to the patients’ own cancers.