Olivia Rezek MSc AMRSB, a Laboratory Scientist at WideCells, reviews the latest research into induced pluripotent stem cells and their potential use as a cancer vaccine:
Autologous iPSC-Based Vaccines Elicit Anti-tumor Responses In Vivo. Kooreman et al., 2018.
Over a century ago, scientists theorised that cancer developed from abnormally stimulated embryonic cells found within normal tissues.
This led to experiments showing that when animals were immunised with fetal tissue, anti-tumour responses were generated against both induced and transplanted tumours.
More recently, research has demonstrated that vaccination of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) into mice, can induce effective immune responses against colon and ovarian carcinoma.
The premise of these experiments is based on the apparent stem cell-like features of neoplastic cells, as both cell types display similar protein expression profiles, and have the capacity to divide indefinitely.
As cancer cells are able to avoid the immune system,it can be assumed that the vaccination of stem cells which share similar characteristics to cancerous cells, works to alert and activate the immune system in a cross-reactive fashion, against both the aberrant stem cells and cancer cells.
Due to the ethical concerns over the source of embryonic and fetal cells the practise of using these stem cells to induce an anti-tumour response has not yet advanced into the clinic.
However, a revolutionary finding in 2007 demonstrated that mature human somatic cells could be reverted back to an immature, stem cell state through the forced expression of pluripotency genes.
Cells which have been manipulated in this way are known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
