in the the australian today

A NEW kind of "shotgun" vaccine has been used to eradicate advanced prostate cancer and could soon be given to patients.

Each year about 35,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer and 10,000 die from the disease.

The vaccine, delivered by a virus, blasts the immune system with thousands of prostate protein tags, some of which are recognised as targets.

Once stimulated, the immune system then seeks out the same protein fragments wherever they can be found.

Since the "antigens" also exist on tumour cells, these are attacked and destroyed.

The human-derived vaccine successfully cured laboratory mice suffering from well-established prostate cancer, with no side-effects.

Scientists believe the same approach could be used to tackle other cancers, including some of the deadliest types affecting the lung, brain and pancreas.


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Progress has already been made towards developing a similar vaccine treatment for melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer.

Clinical trials could be under way "within a few years", according to Professor Alan Melcher, from the University of Leeds, who co-led the research.

The new vaccine overcomes a major obstacle to successful cancer immunotherapy - getting the immune system to recognise cancer as a "foe". Too often, the specific antigens scientists hope will elicit an immune response are ignored.

Using the "shotgun" approach, the immune system is faced with a huge number of antigens including a few of the right ones required for an immune reaction.

They do not even need to be isolated and identified by scientists, only by the immune system.

Repeated injections of the vaccine cured more than 80 per cent of the treated mice, leaving them tumour-free.

The research, by a British team working with US colleagues from the Mayo Clinic at Rochester in Minnesota, was reported on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.