A Perth-based professor is close to developing a new vaccine that would force the human immune system to “wake up” and shrink cancerous tumours. The new approach was designed after researchers discovered that cancers actually fool the immune system to thinking that they are a “friend,” so that cancer-killing cells avoid attacking tumours.

Professor Bruce Robinson, from the University of Western Australia, is working on vaccines that would activate the immune system by delivering cancer mutations to a part of the body. This method would potentially force the immune system to attack and shrink a tumour.

Modern DNA sequencing methods is used to create the vaccines for the immunotherapy strategy.

Although international researchers are working to fight cancers using this method, Robinson, who is also the director of the National Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases, said that none, prior to this study, had succeeded in creating a vaccine that caused tumours to shrink in patients.

Robinson and his team are focused on fighting the asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, and lung cancers. The National Health and Medical Research Council have provided a $2.5 million Centres of Research Excellence grant to the study.

UWA researchers are now conducting tests of the vaccines on animal models, and hope to deliver the vaccines in human clinical trials within a year. The professor hopes that their discovery will be able to immediately help patients in Australia as it would not be limited by a pharmaceutical patent.

“Our researchers have already proved that we can identify these mutations and detect killer cell responses,” Robinson said.

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