Vaccines are the most controversial medical treatment of our time. No other treatment has ever had to deal with the constant need of gaining public confidence over and over again following its first application. This is often in spite of  great success worldwide such as the cases of smallpox and poliomyelitis.

Training ship

The human body is under attack from millions of viruses, bacteria, fungi and other harmful substances every day. Some of them are so aggressive that our immune system does not have enough time to learn how to defend itself. Vaccines act as a ‘training ship’ of the immune system against such noxious pathogenic agents, stimulating mechanisms of defence that our organism would naturally develop to fight back infections. 

 

Generations of vaccines

First and second generation vaccines mimicked harmful infections by inoculating attenuated or dead forms of the pathogen and, more recently, purified subunits of the pathogen. A third innovative generation of vaccines, based on system biology approaches, has recently been developed, producing safer treatments with little to no risk for sensitive, difficult to vaccinate patients. These vaccines work according to the principle that immune responses are triggered by the recognition of characteristic parts of pathogens, called epitopes, able to trigger antibody response.

 

In the future

“Cancer is one of our most deceitful enemies”, says Professor Luigi Buonaguro of the INT Fondazione Pascale – IRCCS, of Naples, Italy. “Our work focuses on the hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC. This is a type of cancer induced mainly by B and C hepatic viruses, which together are estimated to affect around 670 million people worldwide. Approximately 5 to 10% of the population with a chronic hepatic infection will develop hepatocellular carcinoma in the future.”

 

Curing patients

Prof. Buonaguro is the coordinator of the HEPAVAC project, a European research initiative to develop a peptide-based vaccine for curing patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, an extremely malignant type of liver cancer. The project focusing on HCC-therapeutic research consists of a consortium of nine academic institutes, SME and pharmaceutical companies with complementary expertise in cancer immunotherapy and vaccine development.

 

Extremely innovative

“Our research aims at those people who have already developed a liver tumour and have been treated with ablative therapies”, continues Prof. Buonaguro. “The strategy used is extremely innovative: the vaccine will be made of tumour-specific epitopes, characteristic fragments of proteins specific to this type of cancer. Moreover, patient-specific tumour epitopes will be included in the vaccine, allowing the development of personalised therapy matching patient conditions.

 

Cancer vaccine

“By the end of 2018, we hope to have developed a cancer vaccine specifically for HCC and tested its safety and immunogenicity in a Phase I/II human clinical trial”, concludes Prof. Buonaguro. “Hopefully, we will then also have preliminary data on its clinical efficacy.”