Development of a , according to a press release from the University of Oxford, England.
A team of scientists from the University of Oxford, the Francis Crick Institute, and University College London (UCL) will receive funding from the Cancer Research UK and the CRIS Cancer Foundation.
The LungVax vaccine is based on technology similar to that used in the creation of the successful Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and will carry a DNA strand that trains the immune system to recognize the neoantigens that indicate abnormal lung cancer cells and then activate the immune system to kill these cells and stop the cancer, according to the statement.
Initially, scientists are working to develop a vaccine that triggers an immune response in the lab setting. If successful, the vaccine will move directly into a clinical trial. “If the subsequent early trial delivers promising results, the vaccine could then be scaled up to bigger trials for people at high risk of lung cancer,” according to the release.
Help for High-Risk Patients
Lung cancer is diagnosed in approximately 48,000 individuals in the United Kingdom each year, and the average 10-year survival is only 10%, Tim Elliott, MD, professor of immuno-oncology at the University of Oxford and lead researcher on the LungVax project, said in an interview. Nearly three-quarters of the 35,000 annual deaths are preventable by quitting smoking, which remains the best risk reduction strategy to date, he said. However, “an intervention such as a vaccine, given when people are healthy and are more likely to have a strong immune system, could benefit many thousands per year in the UK and 1.8 million patients worldwide,” he said.
Preliminary Trial Plans
The initial trial of the vaccine is a collaboration between Oxford University, UCL, and the Francis Crick Institute, Dr. Elliott said. The trial is a culmination of research into the biology and genetics of lung cancer at UCL and vaccine design research at the University of Oxford.
“We are at a very early stage of the program, which will develop over the next 6 years if all goes to plan,” said Dr. Elliott. The vaccine is designed on the basis of shared lung cancer antigens and packaged into the ChAdOx delivery system that proved successful as the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
“We intend to vaccinate individuals who have had curative surgery for their lung cancer after being diagnosed with a very early stage of the disease,” Dr. Elliott said.
Challenges to vaccine development include knowing whether there is a clinical benefit, Dr. Elliott noted. “Our clinical trial is calculated to show up to 15% reduction in risk over 3-5 years, but only long-term follow-up will really tell us whether the immune responses we see to the vaccine within the first few weeks will have a long-term effect,” he emphasized.
In clinical practice, “these people are cancer-free and healthy after surgery,” said Dr. Elliott. However, “they are at a high risk of recurrence; 30%-70% of ex-patients will develop new cancer in their lifetime and in the majority of cases that will happen within 2 years after surgery,” he said. “We think that vaccinating them against common lung cancer antigens could reduce this risk significantly and remove some of the uncertainty that they live with after their operation.”