First human trial of a new approach to Cancer treatment

Two of the most promising recent approaches to cancer treatment are immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s own immune system to fight cancer, and personalised medicine, which involves therapeutics that are targeted to the genome of a particular patient and that patient’s cancer.
Now scientists have combined those two strategies to create a novel treatment: a vaccine developed for a single patient that triggers an immune system attack that is laser-focused on that patient’s tumors.
In the very first human trial testing this approach, the personalized vaccines successfully activated an immune response in three patients with Melanoma.The broken genes that make a tumor grow out of control “can also be targeted by the immune system to control malignancies,” researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Washington University School of Medicine explained. 
To create the personalized treatments, scientists determined the unique genetic make-up of each patient’s melanoma tumors, which had been surgically removed. They then identified special targets, called neo-antigens, on the surface of each patient’s cancer cells. Using those targets, they developed a personalized vaccine for each patient that would hopefully encourage their immune system to attack these specific neo-antigens on that patient’s cancer cells. Each vaccine took the research team about three months, too long to wait for many cancer patients. They’re hoping a timeline of four to six weeks will become possible as they refine the process. The researchers are eager to try it out on other Cancers that are associated with carcinogens, like Bladder, Lung, and Colorectal Cancers.