Revolutionary Cancer Vaccine Simultaneously Kills and Prevents Brain Tumors

Researchers at Brigham and women’s hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham health care system have found a way to use cancer cells to fight against cancer. The latest work from the lab of Khalid Shah, MS, Ph.D., and his team signifies that their cell therapy could eliminate established tumors and can create long-term immunity. The vaccine will help you by training the immune system to prevent cancer from returning. These results are encouraging and this may be a very effective way to treat cancer in humans. The team of Khalid Shah has tested their dual-action cancer-killing vaccine in a mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma with promising results.

Dual-action cell therapy
Cancer vaccines are an active area of research for many labs, scientist were trying hard for cancer vaccines so that they can prevent cancer but the idea and research of Shah and his colleagues have taken it distinctly. Shah’s team has repurposed living tumor cells that possess an unusual feature. As you have heard homing pigeons return to their roost like that only living tumor cells will travel long distances across the brain to the site of their fellow tumor cells. Taking advantage of this unique property, Shah’s colleagues engineered living tumor cells using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Case9 and repurposed them to release tumor cells as a killing agent. Also, the engineers have designed tumor cells to express factors that would make them easy for the immune system to be strong and for making the immune system anti-tumor response for the long term.
The team tested their repurposed CRISPR-enhanced and reverse-engineered therapeutic tumor cells (Th TC) in different mice strains including the bone marrow, liver, and thymus cells drive from humans, copying the human immune microenvironment. Shah and his team also ensure the two-layered safety switch into the cancer cell. This dual-action therapy was safe, efficacious, and applicable in these models, suggesting a direction toward therapy. While in further proceeding testing and development are needed. Shah and his colleagues specifically chose this model to use human cells to smooth the path of translating their findings for patient settings.
Shah has coated some statements- That throughout all the work we do in the Center even which is very highly technical but we never lose sight of the patient. I and my team goal is to take an innovative approach to the world but with a translatable approach so that we can develop therapeutic cancer-killing vaccine that ultimately will have a lasting impact on medicine.