The team of Dr. Claude Perreault at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at Université de Montréal has successfully shown how a vaccine could work to fight several types of cancers.
The team’s work was published yesterday in Science Translational Medicine and represents a major breakthrough. The team at IRIC looked for a solution in an unusual place: non-coding DNA sequences. Using mice injected with various types of cancer cells, the IRIC team was able to identify numerous antigens deriving from the non-coding portion of DNA, several of which were both specific to cancer cells and common to different types of cancer. This allowed the team to develop a vaccine based on leukemia cells containing some of the identified antigens, which was administered to the mice. The results were highly encouraging.