University gives update on work to find cancer vaccine
FINDING ways of detecting and preventing cancer and neuro-degenerative diseases in their early stages is one of the main areas of research currently for scientists at the University of Southampton.
A team of professors from the university gave a presentation at Les Cotils about how data and computer science is being used to investigate the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as how the human body uses its own immune system to find and destroy cancer.
Dr Tim Fenton, who specialises in cancer biology, said that much of the research being undertaken at the university’s Centre for Cancer Immunology, where he has been based for the past 18 months, involved investigating the role of a protein known as apobec in the development of cancer.
‘Cancer is essentially driven by mutations in our DNA, which cause damage to genes, meaning they mutate and faulty proteins are produced,’ he said.
‘We are trying to better understand why this protein, apobec, gets switched on during the cancer development process, and how we can utilise it. First of all to predict what gene mutations are going to occur, and then potentially develop better vaccines against certain types of cancer.’
Professor Fenton said that developing vaccines against cancer was currently both expensive and time consuming because each one needed to be personalised.
‘As part of research undertaken with Oddfellows, we are trying to predict the antigens that will be generated by the apobec protein. This may then enable us to develop a vaccine that can be used on a large number of people rather than on an individual basis.’
He added that the clinical trials taking place at the centre had involved multiple teams of clinicians, scientists, and even geographers, who had helped to map out gene sequences.
‘For a long time cancer immunotherapy research was considered unfashionable, but now there are plenty of reasons to get excited about it,’ he said.
‘Of the cancer patients we have tested our new treatments on, 20% of them are still cancer-free after 10 years.
‘This is a smaller sub-set than we would ideally like, but we hope to increase it through using different antibodies and even combining treatments.’
He also pointed to the role of computer science and technology in allowing himself and his colleagues to interrogate and profile cancer cells at scale.
‘The technology we have access to is always evolving. For example, we can now sequence single cells at a time rather than clumps, which is a hugely complex analysis and can take our computers a week or more to process.
‘It’s an extremely useful tool in helping us find ways of picking new information up and seeing how we can use this knowledge to prevent cancer at an early stage.’
Centre background
An anonymous £10m. donation in 2012 was the start of the project to develop the Centre for Cancer Immunlogy. There have been two significant donations from Guernsey – £1m. from the Wilkinson Charitable Trust, established by residents Jim and Peggy Wilkinson, and £2m. anonymously in 2017.
Rock band Coldplay also made a significant donation that year. Drummer Will Champion’s mother died of cancer.
