Mayo Clinic and British researchers have developed a new approach to cancer vaccines that purposely kills healthy skin cells to target the immune system against tumours. The new approach has eradicated skin cancer tumours in mice.

The approach and results challenge conventional thinking on the creation of cancer vaccines. Their report on the "heat shock" vaccine therapy appears in the August issue of Nature Biotechnology. Results are promising because multiple rounds of treatment eradicated skin cancer in all the mice in the study. If this work can be extended to humans, it could have enormous benefits, a release from Mayo Clinic said.

Normally, the destruction of healthy cells is undesirable. For example, in toxic conventional chemotherapies for cancer, the goal is to kill cancer cells and spare healthy cells. This new approach is significant for the reasons -
It turns the death of healthy cells into a therapeutic advantage by inflicting a stress known as "inflammatory cell death" on skin cells to which researchers attached a protein involved in heat shock. Researchers were able to trigger a healing immune response aimed at the skin cancer tumours. The response was so strong it eradicated the tumours; Researchers avoided triggering autoimmune attacks, which are a common disabling side effect of most cancer vaccine attempts. In autoimmune attacks the body attacks and injures itself -instead of the cancer. This new approach appears to breach a major obstacle to advancing cancer vaccine research from the laboratory into human trials, the release added.

"We're very encouraged by these results because our main interest is in generating cancer vaccines that will stimulate the immune system to recognize tumours and eradicate them. We hope our novel approach will be a more specific, and therefore gentler therapy for patients," says Mayo immunologist and lead researcher Richard Vile.

"This is very hopeful because we think in the clinic there are good chances we can control anti-tumour effects before we get to the autoimmune problems," says Dr. Vile.