Inspiring Innovation is our round-up of news from a thriving innovation landscape collated by our Sector Intelligence team, now with a focus on news and updates relating to our priority area, cancer. Fuelling our ambitions to elevate Wales as a place of choice for health and social care innovation and investment.
In this edition, find out about NHS England’s new cancer vaccine, a fluorescent dye that helps surgeons spot and remove prostate cancer cells, and NICE’s recommendations for tumour profiling tests to guide chemotherapy decisions in early breast cancer.
NHS England launches ‘matchmaking’ service for cancer vaccine clinical trials
NHS England have treated its first patient, a 55-year-old colorectal cancer patient, from the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad (CVLP), a platform that speeds up access to innovative vaccines that may prevent the recurrence of cancer.
Cancer-targeting vaccines are created by analysing a patient’s tumour to identify mutations specific to their cancer and creating a personalised mRNA vaccine containing the ‘instructions’ needed for cells to create proteins that can mark cancer cells. This primes a patient’s immune system to be able to find and kill any remaining cancer cells after surgery or a course of chemotherapy.
The CVLP is a collaboration between NHS England, Genomics England and BioNTech, and aims to provide up to 10,000 patients with personalised cancer treatments in the UK by 2030. BioNTech are also developing vaccines against head and neck cancer, lung cancer, melanoma and pancreatic cancer.
Professor Peter Johnson, NHS national clinical director for cancer said:
“Even after a successful operation, cancers can sometimes return because a few cancer cells are left in the body, but using a vaccine to target those remaining cells may be a way to stop this happening. I’m delighted that through our national launch pad we will be widening the opportunities to be part of these trials for many more people, with thousands of patients expected to be recruited in the next year.”
Find out more about the vaccines
Fluorescent dye helps surgeons find and remove prostate cancer
A dye developed by Oxford University and ImaginAb can identify cancerous cells during surgical procedures that cannot be seen by traditional clinical methods, allowing surgeons to remove all traces of a patient’s cancer.
This works by injecting a patient about to undergo a prostatectomy with an antibody which binds to an antigen that is commonly found on the surface of prostate cancer cells. Surgeons can shine a light onto the prostate and surrounding areas, making prostate cancer cells glow, so they can be removed without harming healthy tissue.
Professor Freddia Hamdy, lead author, said:
“With this technique, we can strip all the cancer away, including the cells that have spread from the tumour and could give it the chance to come back later. It also allows us to preserve as much of the healthy structures around the prostate as we can, to reduce unnecessary life-changing side-effects like incontinence and erectile dysfunction.”
Three tumour profiling tests to guide breast cancer treatment recommended for NHS use
The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) have recommended the use of three tumour profiling tests to guide adjuvant chemotherapy decisions in early breast cancer.
NICE assessed four tumour profiling tests using tumour samples from people with early breast cancer, creating a risk profile which can be used to inform treatment decisions and predict whether chemotherapy is likely to benefit the patient.
Mark Chapman, interim director of the Health Technologies Programme at NICE, said:
“Choosing whether to have chemotherapy is a tough decision to make when you don’t have all the information available to you. A test that can help to predict the risk of the breast cancer spreading should be considered as a significant step forward for patients”.
Cancer focussed innovator?
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