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Making Progress With Cancer Vaccines

Michael Morse, MD, is working on several fronts to develop and improve cancer vaccine therapies, which teach the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

 “One advantage of vaccine therapy is that you don’t have to keep giving it,” Morse says. “With most drugs, you have to keep taking them, every day or every week. With a vaccine, once it is given three or four times initially, it may only need to be given occasionally in the future as booster. The immune system has ‘memory,’ so it can keep working against a cancer by itself, once stimulated.”

Morse is working to perfect vaccines against several types of cancer, including breast cancer and colorectal cancer. 

In early studies of a vaccine against colorectal cancer, patients who had failed to respond to all other therapies showed an encouraging response to the vaccine.

A great deal of work remains to be done, according to Morse, but bit by bit he and other researchers are advancing the potential clinical use of therapeutic cancer vaccines not only to treat patients with cancer but also to help protect those who don’t yet have it.

 “Way down the line, you might start to look at it as a preventative,” he says. “You might treat people who don’t have active cancer but have a high risk of recurrence, or a high risk of developing cancer in the first place. That’s a long-term strategy.”

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