Cancer Vaccines

Journey to Actualize Cancer Vaccines: Detect the Mutation

Due to unpredictable mutations during cell divisions, a normal cell in our body changes its characteristics into a cancer cell which makes the normal cells recognize them as abnormal, allowing the cancer cells to have an invisible ability. There are two types of cancer vaccines: preventive cancer vaccines and therapeutic cancer vaccines. It would be best to have a universal cancer vaccine that would cure all patients with the same type of cancer, but since every persons’ mutations are different, patient-specific vaccines are the only way to make cancer vaccines successful. Before we make personalized cancer vaccines, we need to know which protein to use by discovering the mutation spot. Thanks to Next Generation Sequencing, the time of reading all the nucleic acid sequences was shortened compared to that of the Human Genome Project. Other than detecting the mutation, making the vaccine as fast as possible was critical to the success of cancer vaccines, so scientists came up with a solution: mRNA vaccines

Journey to Actualize Cancer Vaccines: Make Vaccines Faster

People use vaccines to prevent diseases from destroying our bodies and becoming the host to a virus. To illustrate this, a player needs many competition experiences to achieve a champion title. When our cells confront a certain opponent (virus) they fight back and figure out ways to beat it, this causes our cells to win easier the next time because they remember the fight. There are two ways of holding this competition: using weak viruses or inactivated ones. In the medical field, we call them live-attenuated vaccines and inactivated vaccines. Surprisingly, Covid vaccines are based on neither of them. These vaccines utilize mRNA vaccine technology for cells to make protein antigens which instruct and trigger the synthesis of proteins that the immune system uses to react to viruses. The key to Pfizer being able to synthesize Covid vaccines is mRNA vaccine technology, they have cooperated with BioNTech, a company that has focused on using this technology for cancer vaccines even before the pandemic.

FDA Approved Cancer Vaccines

1. Preventive Cancer Vaccines

   1. Cervarix: a vaccine that prevents HPV types 16 and 18 infection

   2. Gardasil: a vaccine that prevents HPV types 16, 18, 6, and 11 infection

   3. Gardasil-9: a vaccine that prevents HPV types 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58 infection

   4. Hepatitis B (HBV) vaccine: a vaccine that prevents hepatitis B virus and development of HBV-related liver cancer

2. Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines

   1. Bacillus Calmette-Guérin: a vaccine that treats early-stage bladder cancer

   2. Sipuleucel-T: a vaccine that treats prostate cancer

Side Effects

The National Cancer Institute says that the side effects depend on how healthy a person is before treatment, the type of cancer, how advanced it is, the type of treatment vaccines, and the dose. These are the list of possible side effects of cancer vaccines:

• Fever

• Chills

• Back pain

• Fatigue

• Joint ache

• Nausea

• Neuralgia (pain from damaged or irritated nerves)

• Headache

• Trouble breathing

• Low or high blood pressure