Comments by Glenn Dranoff, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston
"While the notion of the development of cancer vaccines is quite old--going back almost a century, in fact--clinical experience in the field has in most cases been disappointing," observes Glenn Dranoff, an assistant professor of medicine at the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. "However, modern ad-vances, such as gene-transfer technologies and the ability to clone cytokine genes, have given us the means to test the possibilities of cancer vaccines in new ways which were not possible before.
"The idea that engineering tumor cells to produce cytokines might impact on the host's response to the tumors was first suggested in the late 1980s," he recounts. "An early study showed tumor cells engineered to produce interleukin-4 [IL-4] were rejected when injected back into the host [R. Tepper et al., Cell, 57:503- 12, 1989]. Yet another study showed ...
