The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7465 p175
18 August 2007

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Therapeutic cancer vaccines could work with chemotherapy

Combining a therapeutic cancer vaccine with chemotherapy may bring treatment benefits, research on colorectal cancer patients suggests (Clinical Cancer Research 2007;13:4487).

Cytotoxic medicines have been thought to suppress immune responses and so few studies have examined the use of a cancer vaccine alongside chemotherapy. However, researchers from Oxford BioMedica assessed immune responses in 11 patients who were receiving 5-fluorouracil, folinic acid and oxaliplatin and had been vaccinated with TroVax (a modified virus encoding a tumour antigen).

They detected specific responses for the tumour antigen in 10 of the patients and found a correlation between immune response and clinical benefit.