Ovarian cancer returns after surgery in 85 per cent of cases PROFESSORS P.M. MOTTA & S. MAKABE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

A personalised cancer vaccine that trains the immune system to attack tumours has had encouraging results in women with ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in women – around 7,300 women in the UK are diagnosed with it each year. The disease often isn’t recognised until it has already spread, and even after successful treatment, there is a high risk of the cancer returning. Only half of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive for five years or more.

Cancer vaccines have been showing promise in clinical trials, but few worldwide have made it into the clinic for routine use. Many of these vaccines are designed to train immune cells to recognise particular molecules that are often present in cancer cells, but this can fail because tumours vary between different people.


To get around this problem, Lana Kandalaft from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and her team have created personalised vaccines that are tailored to each individual tumour. To do this, they take samples from a woman’s tumour and kill the cells with acid, which exposes molecules that are normally hidden. These dead cells are then mixed with immune cells from the woman’s blood, and grown in the lab for a few days before being injected back into her.

Extended survival

To test the safety of this approach, Kandalaft and her colleagues gave personalised vaccines to five women with recurrent ovarian cancer. They also gave vaccines to 20 other women with ovarian cancer, in combination with either one or two chemotherapy drugs. These drugs kill cancer cells, but are also known to boost the immune system.

The women received a dose of the vaccine every three weeks, for 15 weeks, and then monthly injections until their disease progressed or their vaccine supply ran out.

The team found that the vaccine was safe and did trigger immune responses against the women’s tumours. The women who showed stronger immune responses subsequently lived longer than those with weaker ones. The women who received the vaccine alongside both chemotherapy drugs showed the best survival rates – 80 per cent of these women were still alive two years later, compared with around 50 per cent of women with similar stages of cancer who received only the drugs.

Ovarian cancer bounces back in 85 per cent of women who undergo surgery, so Kandalaft thinks a vaccine could be given post-surgery, to women in remission, to reduce the chances of this happening. Kandalaft says her team’s results show that it’s important to keep samples of a women’s tumour when she undergoes surgery, so that a personalised vaccine can be made.

Journal reference: Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aao5931