This could be interesting.
We know that there are existing and effective vaccines for several cancers, if this “universal” one works, it will change things significantly for many of us today and hopefully for all humanity.
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I won’t be first in line.
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I’m skeptical as it relies on boosting a pathway (Type I IFNs) that while initially thought to be “good” for anti-tumor immunity, is now being appreciated as a suppressor of anti-tumor immunity when chronically “on”. See the fails of companies like Aduro that tried boosting Type I IFNs with cGAS/STING agonist in the 2010s…went nowhere, despite looking great in mouse models.
One problem is these therapies always look incredible in short-term studies of mouse cancer that develop on ridiculous fast timescales - the mouse tumors never set up a human-like immunosuppressive environment because they grow so rapidly. Thus, they fail to capture that what looks good on these timescales to a mouse tumor may be “bad” for a solid human tumor that takes months/years to develop and set up an immunosuppressive environment (including one that likely co-opts the very pathway you they are trying to boost for evil, not good).
Case in-point: a recent study found that patients that have endogenous anti-Type I IFN blocking auto-antibodies actually responded BETTER to anti-PD-L1 checkpoint blockade/Keytruda therapy. So again, data supporting the idea that chronic Type I IFN = bad for human anti-tumor immunity in established solid tumors:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09188-4
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Thanks for the additional info, another reason to never fully trust a mouse!!
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I imagine this may end up as part of protocol for specific type of patients i.e. older with poor immune response that were diagnosed with specific cancer with specific staging along with specific protocol. So a pretty narrow indication.
Certainly not as an universal vaccine for all, revving up innate immune system to induce inflammation and potentially autoimmunity is not a good idea.
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Totally!
SOME mouse models better recapitulate human tumor development & the immunosuppressive environment that gets set up…but they are models that take the endogenous tumors in mice weeks/months to develop…which means time + $$$ that researchers don’t want to spend (particularly when they could inject a bolus of tumor cells into a young healthy mouse and have a “tumor” in a week). The incentives to do better research are misaligned, unfortunately.
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Cancer remains the bus. You do everything right for your health, then step off the curb and the cancer bus hits you.
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Most likely it will be used this way, as a few other cancer vaccines are. I see that there are 7 types/families of cancer vaccines. Only a few are for long term prevention. Most are as you note, for specific patient and cancer types.
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