Please quote Nature Medicine as the source of this item. Two papers in the March issue of Nature Medicine describe new vaccines with the potential to treat the deadly skin cancer, melanoma. By modifying the melanoma antigen, gp100, a team from the US National Cancer Institute at the NIH, led by Steven Rosenberg, increased the antigen's ability to attract CTLs to tumor sites.
Dendritic cells are particularly effective at presenting antigens to CTLs.
Schadendorf's team took dendritic cells from melanoma patients and loaded them with a cocktail of antigens from the patient's own cancerous cells. These dendritic vaccines were then injected directly into patient's lymph nodes. Large scale clinical trials are now required to evaluate the efficacy of both types of vaccine. In addition, many other tumors, such as prostate, breast and ovary cancer, express unique proteins, which means that these cancers are also suitable targets for this type of vaccine. Gene therapy for metabolic disorders Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a novel form of gene therapy called chimeraplasty, the first application of which may be the treatment of metabolic disorders that originate through a genetic defect in liver cells.