Our immune systems detect and eliminate many kinds of threats to our body, including bacteria, viruses, and other foreign agents. We know the immune system can detect cancer. In fact, activating the immune system with vaccines is the best and only tool for completely eliminating cancer at the single-cell level. But cancers have developed ways to survive by suppressing and evading the immune cells that would otherwise kill them. 

To effectively kill tumor cells, our work has shown that the human body needs to produce a specific type of immune response. It’s known as a Type I immune response — specifically, a MHC Class II restricted CD4+ Th1 cell response.

A major goal for the CVI team is to develop vaccines that specifically create this Type I inflammatory, anti-cancer immune response. In doing so, we’re developing vaccines that prevent cancer from occurring, treat cancer when it does occur, and prevent recurrence once remission is obtained. 

While our early vaccines were peptide based, our current vaccines are DNA vaccines. DNA vaccines encode immunogenic proteins, or antigens, that are expressed at high levels in tumors and drive tumor growth and metastasis. We select specific segments, or epitopes, of those antigen proteins that elicit the Type I immune response needed to kill cancer cells. 
Using these methods, we create multi-antigen, multi-epitope vaccines for some of the most common and deadly cancers — including breast, ovarian, lung, colon, prostate, and bladder cancer. 

After vaccination, the patient’s cells express the antigen proteins and the immune system begins its training to recognize the proteins as foreign and dangerous. When vaccine-trained T-cells come into contact with cancer cells expressing those antigen proteins, they signal for an immune response to eliminate the cancer cells. The vaccines create immunologic memory, which leads to lasting protection for patients that’s effective even years after vaccination. 
 

We currently have vaccines to treat and prevent cancer and/or its recurrence for breast, ovarian, colon, lung, bladder, and prostate cancer. We look forward to expanding into other cancers as well.