Yvette van Kooyk is making a cancer vaccine at the nano scale. "By using nanotechnology to deliver vaccines into the body, we can create more powerful cancer treatments," says van Kooyk, an immunologist at the VU University Medical Centerin Amsterdam. She's building nanovaccines out of glycans, sugar molecules that naturally bind to receptors on immune cells in the body.
"The glycan is used for specifically targeting the cells that you need," van Kooyk explains. She exploits this trait by attaching the glycans to cancer-fighting antigens, relying on the sugar molecules totransport those antigens directly into the target immune cells, where they trigger an immune response, telling the body to attack its cancerous cells.
Because the vaccine can target immune cells so precisely, "you don't lose your vaccine to other cells," van Kooyk says. That enables the vaccine to launch a targeted and particularly powerful immune response that may be capable of destroying tumours.
Now, she is tailoring the nanovaccine to work on diseases including melanoma, pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, a brain tumour. The goal is to give patients lifelong immunity from certain cancers so that they don't develop again, she says. In three years, she estimates, they will start trialling the vaccines on humans.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
