A New Era for Treatment: Cancer Vaccines

A cancer vaccine using a special type of molecule is one of the newer research trajectories aimed at improving cancer treatment.

By Tanvi Patil

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports almost 10 million people died from cancer in 2022, so wouldn’t it be great if we could mitigate this trend? Scientists from the University of Florida (UF) recently engineered new connections between cancer and cytokines, a special type of molecule that elicits immune responses, to help control tumor growth. These connections can be harnessed to stimulate the body’s immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells through a cancer vaccine. 

Introduction to cancer

Cancer is a disease that arises from uncontrolled cell growth and division of abnormal cells. These cells tend to divide more quickly due to mutations in their genetic code. This prevents their internal machinery from fully checking if appropriate maturation checkpoints have been met.

Once enough of these cancerous cells have clumped together, they give rise to a solid structure known as a tumor. Furthermore, the cancer can metastasize (a.k.a. spread) when pieces of it break off and travel to different parts of the body through the circulatory system. The tumor is also known to have its own landscape defined by biomarker concentrations and mutation rates that can impact surrounding healthy cells to become cancerous and promote tumor growth, making it one of the most complex and challenging diseases to cure. 

Current cancer treatments

Three main classes of treatments currently exist for cancer treatments, though none of them guarantee complete remission: chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Chemotherapy involves exposing the cancer to pharmaceutical molecules that inhibit or reduce cell growth; however, these often also affect healthy cells. Similar to chemotherapy, radiation targets cancer on the cellular level by blasting high energy waves called radiation to kill cancer cells. This method can also have a negative effect on healthy cells by making them more prone to mutations. Surgery, on the other hand, physically removes visible tumors from the body. Unfortunately, this method does not target cancer on the cellular level, resulting in high relapse rates. 

RELATED: Could Chemotherapy Efficacy Be Better?

Given the drawbacks of these traditional cancer therapies, scientists and doctors began testing the potential of using immune cells to specifically attack cancer cells without touching healthy cells as an alternative treatment in the early 2010s. This line of thought quickly blossomed into a new sector of bioengineering: immunoengineering. Though promising for developing cancer vaccines and cell-based therapies, the technology proposed in this field is still very new and highly expensive to scale at a global level, suggesting more research is needed to propel it to the global therapeutic market. This deficiency has also motivated the field to investigate the role of cytokines in managing immune responses, and potentially couple them with traditional cancer therapies to improve treatment responses.

Cancer vaccines and their mode of action

Researchers around the world have begun exploring the potential of a “cancer vaccine” as a novel treatment option. Let’s start by discussing what a traditional vaccine is and how it works.

Vaccines come in several forms, but they all have the same general mode of action. They involve presenting T-cells (cells in your immune system that can memorize and attack foreign substances) with a special targeting protein called an antigen. T-cells learn the structure of this antigen and develop a corresponding protein in their cells called an antibody. T-cells use their antibodies to recognize the antigen during “real” viral infections, and attack all substances containing it. The typical flu vaccine involves injecting a weakened version of the virus to allow your immune system’s T-cells to build an antibody against it. In contrast, the COVID-19 vaccine directly injects the DNA of the antigen that the body then builds into a protein; T-cells then use this antigen to construct a corresponding antibody. Here, the DNA acts as a “genetic blueprint,” essentially providing cells with an instruction manual on how to construct a specific protein—the antigen, in this case. 

However, the cancer vaccine proposed by UF scientists is unlike these traditional vaccines. Instead, it involves controlling the amount of IFN-I (a specific type of cytokine) produced in the tumor to recruit the immune system to decrease cancer growth. They translated this into a vaccine by combining the effects of IFN-I in improving treatment response with the natural killer properties of immune cells.

Specifically, the scientists developed small carriers called lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to carry the genetic blueprint of well-studied virus antigens that increase IFN-I production. They injected these LNPs into solid tumors in mice; they then observed the tumor size and survival rate in treated and untreated groups. The findings of the UF study suggest that brain and lung tumors with a higher concentration of IFN-I are more capable of recruiting T-cells to fight cancer. This was demonstrated by a smaller tumor volume and higher survival rate in groups injected with the vaccine. 

The future of cancer therapies

While the findings of this study are promising in developing a robust cancer vaccine, there is still a long way to go before a technology like this enters the market for human applications. Specifically, this study was done in mice and not primates like us, so there could be significant response discrepancies when scaled in clinical trials. It is also important to note the immune system is highly dynamic and bipolar. This means that most cytokines can elicit both immune system activating and deactivating responses. A long-term understanding of their role must be uncovered before this can be tested as a potential cancer treatment for humans.

Overall, while a cancer diagnosis can seem bleak from treatment options to possible outcomes, studies like this show scientists are pushing for new therapeutic discoveries. Given the rising trend in studying and engineering the immune system, I would not be surprised if we soon start seeing vaccines modulating the immune response to complement traditional therapies in treating diseases like cancer. 

This study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. 

Reference

Qdaisat, S., Wummer, B., Stover, B. D., et al. (2025). Sensitization of tumours to immunotherapy by boosting early type-I interferon responses enables epitope spreading. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 9, 1437–1452. doi: 10.1038/s41551-025-01380-1