Treatment for leukemia comes in two stages--chemotherapy to rid the body of the disease, then to prevent it returning either further chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant. Latest survival rates reveal that more than half the people with leukemia die within five years of diagnosis.

The first patients to be treated as part of the clinical trial at King’s College Hospital (London, UK) have the form of the disease known as acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the most common form in adults. Even with aggressive treatment, half would typically find the disease returns. In the initial stages of the trial patients will be enrolled in the trial if they have had chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. If early trials are successful, the vaccine may be tested in patients who cannot have a bone marrow transplant because they are unsuitable or a match cannot be found.

The study led by Prof. Ghulam Mufti, Prof. Farzin Farzaneh, and Dr. Nicola Hardwick has involved comprehensive work to develop a synthetic virus, which carries the two genes into the immune system. Farzin Farzaneh, professor of molecular medicine, in the department of hematooncology at the College, reported that if the trials are successful then the vaccine could be “rolled out” to treat other leukemias and cancers. “It is the same concept as normal vaccines. The immune system is made to see something as foreign and can then destroy it itself. This has the chance to be curative.”

The hypothesis behind cancer vaccines is not necessarily to prevent the disease. Instead, once a patient has been diagnosed, the vaccine programs the immune system to search for cancer cells and destroy them. The vaccine then triggers the immune system to recognize leukemia cells if they return, which prevents a relapse of the disease. The vaccine is created by removing cells from the patient’s blood and manipulating them in the laboratory.

The cells are given two genes that act as flags to help identify the leukemia. It effectively focuses and boosts the immune system’s ability to seek out and destroy cancer cells. The research is to be published in an upcoming issue of Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy.

The study follows successful experiments on experimental tumor models demonstrating that injection with the gene modified tumor cells results in the induction of immune mediated tumor rejection.

The research was carried out at King's College London’s Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC), which is one of 17 new centers across the United Kingdom launched to develop basic science into treatments for patients as quickly as possible.

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