Transforming cancer treatments with DNA vaccines

Southampton researchers have developed a pioneering new DNA vaccine that could revolutionise the way cancer is treated in the future.

Leukaemia is a malignant disease of the bone marrow and blood that causes around 220,000 deaths worldwide each year. The new vaccine attempts to tackle the disease head-on by strengthening a person’s immune system against a gene (known as Wilm’s Tumour Gene 1) that is present almost all forms of leukaemia.

The DNA vaccine is now being trialled, for the first time in the UK, at centres in Southampton, London and Exeter. The trial is bring coordinated nationally by the University of Southampton Clinical Trials Unit (UoSCTU). Over the next two years, a selected group of volunteers with with either chronic or acute mycloid leukaemia will receive the vaccine.

The volunteers will be treated in a ground-breaking new way. A technique called electroporation will be used that delivers controlled, rapid electrical pulses to make cell membranes more permeable or ‘leaky’ so that they can absorb and retain the vaccine injected into muscle or skin tissue more easily.

The research is funded by the charity Lekaemia & Lymphoma Research and the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation Programme which is financed by the Medical Research Council and managed by the National Institute for Health Research. The electroportation technique was developed by the US pharmaceutical company Inovio. UoSCTU receives core funding from Cancer Research UK and Clinical Trials Unit, CTU, support funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).