Personalised vaccines being trialled for bowel cancer patients are a “really big advance”, a senior consultant at a leading cancer hospital has said.
The doctor at The Christie Hospital in Manchester said the experimental vaccines were a “wonderful idea” but scientists would have to wait until the end of the clinical trial to show if they truly worked.
The treatment involves taking part of a person’s cancerous tumour and using it to create a vaccine, designed to activate the body’s own immune system if the disease were to return.
One of the patients who is on the trial, Richard Nelson, from Timperley, has been given the vaccines since September, following surgery and chemotherapy.
The 73-year-old, who was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in November 2023, is hopeful the vaccine could stave off the return of the disease.
He had surgery in December 2023, followed by chemotherapy and began taking the experimental vaccine 10 months later.
Mr Nelson said: “I’d say, if you’re offered a clinical trial, go for it.
“I also think I may be able to help other people, other than myself.”
He said unlike the debilitating effects of chemotherapy the vaccine had “flu-like side-effects” and he was still able to enjoy “long-distance walks and hobbies including Morris Dancing”.
The experimental vaccine is given to patients once they have had surgery to remove the tumour.
Professor Mark Saunders, consultant oncologist who is leading on the clinical trial at The Christie, said: “The vaccine is a personalised one.
“It gets his body’s immune system to actually fight the cancer. Hopefully it will stop it coming back.”
He said the vaccine was being tested for colon cancer patients but “you could also take the antigens from other cancers and make vaccines for other patients as well”.
He described the vaccine trial as: “a really big advance” but added: “We have to show that it works first.
“Until we reach the end of the trial and work out how many people are still alive, we won’t really know if it works – but it is a wonderful idea.”
Bowel cancer is responsible for about 16,000 deaths in the UK each year.
The German pharmaceutical company BioNTech SE is developing the vaccine with Genetech, a member of the Roche Group.
The trial is recruiting patients in the UK and the United States.
