Rewinding skin cells back to their origins in the womb could provide a powerful new vaccine against multiple types of cancer.
of Stanford University, California, and his team have found that a mouse鈥檚 immune system can be primed to recognise and target cancer cells by vaccinating them beforehand with stem cells.
This technique was inspired by evidence that cancers grow like embryos do, vital for rapid growth during pregnancy that had been switched off after birth. To help the immune system recognise this, the team took skin cells from mice and turned them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) 鈥� primordial cells similar to those in a fetus. These iPSCs carry some of the same proteins on their surface as many cancer cells, says Wu.
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Vanishing tumours
Before injecting these into the mice they had been made from, Wu鈥檚 team first killed the stem cells with radiation so that they wouldn鈥檛 grow inside the body, and combined them with a substance that helps trigger the immune system into action.
The mice received injections under the skin every week for a month, before being given implants of different types of tumours. In mice that hadn鈥檛 been injected with the dead stem cells, these tumours continued to grow. But tumours shrank in all treated mice. Breast cancers vanished in seven out of 10 vaccinated mice, while skin cancers were eradicated from five out of nine treated mice.
鈥淭his work is from giants in the field of cancer immunology, whose work has proven time and again to be rock solid,鈥� says of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
