India’s efforts to manufacture a therapeutic vaccine against cancer are right on the track and are expected to hit the markets in a couple years time as the human trials are beginning very soon on the candidate molecule, Department of Biotechnology (DBT) sources said.

“The candidate target molecule was invented at National Institute of Immunology (NII) under the DBT, and was tried on rodents using different cancer cell lines. Clinical trials have been fixed for Cancer Institute (WIA) Adyar in Chennai and will start soon,” a senior official of DBT disclosed.

The institute had received one round of approval from its ethics committee and is waiting for the clearance from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) and the trial on 18 patients with stage III cervical cancer will start by end of the next month.

The vaccine, once in the markets, may prove to be a boon to those suffering from breast, ovarian, cervical, thyroid and blood cancer. The vaccine centres around a new cancer treatment modality called dendritic cell therapy, in which a patient's own immune cells are used to fight cancer. These cells, which are a kind of immune cells, are present in the body in small quantity. The therapy involves taking out blood cells from the patient and processing them in the laboratory to produce the dendritic cells in large quantities and with improved efficacy, sources said.

Besides the Chennai institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in the US will also carry out the trials under an agreement between NII and the National Cancer Institute under the US government's National Institutes of Health (NIH). Chennai leg of trials will focus on cervical cancer, while that in the US on ovarian cancer.