Catherine J. Wu, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA, is a pioneer in research that may result in the development of personalised vaccines to treat cancer. She was awarded the Sjöberg Prize for her work.
This year’s Sjöberg Prize awards discoveries about how the body’s immune system can be activated and stimulated to fight cancer. These discoveries make it possible to develop vaccines that are personalised to each patient’s unique tumour. In a not-too-distant future, vaccines of this type could be offered to a large group of patients with types of cancers that are currently difficult or impossible to cure.
“Catherine Wu has been enormously important in moving forward research in this field. She has played a decisive role in making it possible to conduct clinical trials of cancer vaccines for melanoma (skin cancer), pancreatic cancer and lung cancer,” informed Urban Lendahl, Professor of Genetics at Karolinska Institutet and Secretary of the Prize Committee.
That the immune system can discover and, in some cases, fight tumours has been known since the 1950s. Using these insights, various strategies have been employed to develop immunotherapy-based cancer treatments.
Catherine J. Wu focused her research on small mutations in cancer cells, which give rise to tumour neoantigens. These are structures that the immune system’s T cells can recognise as foreign and attack. By sequencing DNA from healthy cells and cancer cells, she was able to identify a cancer patient’s unique tumour neoantigens.
She then produced synthetic copies of these, which were injected as a type of vaccine. For some of the patients, this resulted in the immune system’s cells being activated and targeting the tumour cells.
As per the press release, her breakthrough results were published in an article in Nature in 2017, which describes an initial trial in which six patients with melanoma were vaccinated with patient-specific neoantigens. Since then, Wu and other researchers have continued to further develop this technique. However, development is still at an early stage, so the research funding part of the Sjöberg Prize, 9,00,000 US dollars, will be of great benefit for continued research.
