ISTOCK, NOPPARITWith their pluripotency and ability to self-renew, some cancer cells have been likened to stem cells. Now, researchers show that the similarities between the cells are in fact sufficient for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to serve as anti-cancer vaccines in mice. A paper in Cell Stem Cell today (February 15) reports that injections of irradiated iPSCs protect mice from developing breast, lung, and skin cancers, and prevent surgically removed cancers from regrowing.
“The approach, at first glance, seems simplistic and naive,” cancer researcher Robert Weinberg of MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research writes in an email to The Scientist. “Why should an early embryonic cell or a cell closely related to such an embryonic cell display markers that would provoke the immune system to attack certain types of cancer cells?”
But while it may not be intuitive to use an unrelated cell type to trigger immunity against cancer, hints that the scheme might work were dotted here and there throughout the literature. For example, cancer cells and embryonic cells have similar gene-expression and antigen profiles, and studies from almost a century ago showed that injecting embryonic material into animals protected them from transplanted tumors. More recently, embryonic ...
