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Pancreatic and bowel cancers are two of the most difficult to treat, but they often sport a unique marker that can serve as a target for killer T cells. Oncologists at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Texas’ MD Andersons Cancer Center have led a collaborative study showing that the KRAS gene marker which appears in 93% of pancreatic cancers and 50% of colorectal cancers can serve as the basis for new vaccine against these cancers.

In a human phase 1 study, 20 patients with pancreatic cancer and 5 patients with bowel cancer unresponsive to other therapies received an anti-KRAS protein vaccine without undesirable side effects. 84% of the treated group developed detectable T cell immunity against the KRAS gene and that same percentage had measurable reduction in circulating KRAS tumor antigen. 24% of patients had complete elimination of these KRAS biomarkers. Those patients with the best anti-KRAS immune responses were still living longer than the 16 month median while those with the lowest responses had median survivals of only 4 months.

Most current cancer vaccines are personal vaccines created using time-consuming and expensive techniques from a patient’s own tumor cells only work for that patient. This anti-KRAS vaccination technique for cancers like pancreatic and colon offers the possibility of developing a more universal vaccine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02760-3

#cancer #vaccine #pancreatic #colorectal #KRAS #tcells

New Immunotherapy For Nasty Cancers

Dr. Howard Smith Reports