The science of cancer interception is advancing at Penn Medicine with a new platform to develop cancer vaccines that piles scientific strength upon strength.
2 min. read
Since the advent of robust and widespread vaccines against illnesses such as measles and diphtheria, chronic conditions like cancer now cause the most mortality nationwide. What if vaccines against cancer could have the same success?
The idea of vaccinating against cancer isn’t new—just challenging, because cancerous tumors have many tricks to avoid being seen as a target for the immune system. But today, after more than 50 years of federally funded research into the architecture of immunity, scientists have the clearest picture to date of how the immune system can fight off cancer before it takes root.
Researchers in the lab of Robert Vonderheide at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center.
(Image: Margo Reed Studio)
At the Basser Center for BRCA in Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center, a quest for effective cancer prevention vaccines is one of the key priorities of the Basser Cancer Interception Institute, which was established in 2022 with a gift from Basser Center founders Mindy and Jon Gray that brought their total support to Basser to $115 million. Among the active efforts that have since begun to advance the science of stopping cancer before it can start, the center completed enrollment into a cancer vaccine clinical trial last year. The institute is funding research across other multiple cancer types, including breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer.
This spring, Penn Medicine scientists showed for the first time that a medical intervention could stop growth of pre-cancerous lesions in the pancreas at such early stages before they develop into pancreatic cancer, in a mouse model. Complementing that progress, work on developing new cancer interception vaccines is now accelerating with the goal of stopping cancer before it starts by harnessing the power of the immune system.
The Basser Cancer Interception Institute is supporting a five-year, $5 million grant in immune interception that builds on this earlier work and on Penn Medicine’s strengths in immune health and mRNA vaccines.
“It's really ambitious to say out loud, ‘We want to intercept cancer,’” says the leader of this immune initiative Christopher Hunter, the Mindy Halikman Heyer Distinguished Professor of Pathobiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine. “It’s a gutsy approach.”
It’s also a timely approach, as cancer vaccines seem poised to grow even in a challenging funding landscape: A new public-private partnership between the National Cancer Institute and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is proposing a plan to invest $200 million in cancer vaccine research. Robert Vonderheide, director of the Abramson Cancer Center, serves as a member of the Cancer Vaccines Initiative Design Phase Committee, a national group of academic, federal, biotech and industry scientists who advise on the partnership and its plans.
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