GSK and Oxford researchers to create cancer vaccine to stop disease developing
GSK and Oxford researchers to create cancer vaccine to stop disease developing
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Pharmaceutical giant GSK and the University of Oxford are creating a new cancer vaccine to prevent the disease from developing. The partnership intends to create a vaccine or vaccines which target cells at the pre-cancerous stage, before the disease has taken hold and begun to wreak havoc on the body.
Oxford University has world-leading expertise in the study of pre-cancer biology, such as through identifying and sequencing neoantigens, which are proteins that forms on cancer cells and can be a target for drugs. The purpose of the vaccine is not to vaccinate against established cancer, but to actually vaccinate against that pre-cancer stage.
Several pharmaceutical firms have already had success with cancer vaccines that stop the disease coming back in people who already have established cancer. Professor Sarah Blagden, from the University of Oxford, will co-lead the new GSK-Oxford Cancer Immuno-Prevention Programme, which is backed by £50 million from GSK.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Cancer does not sort of come from nowhere. “You always imagine it would take about a year or two years to develop in your body but, in fact, we now know that cancers can take up to 20 years, sometimes even more, to develop – as a normal cell transitions to become cancerous.
“We know that, actually at that point, most cancers are invisible when they are going through this, what we now call pre-cancer stage. We have been able to work out what features ... cells have as they're transitioning towards cancer, and so we can design a vaccine specifically targeted against that.
