Argentina develops vaccine to combat lung cancer

By Valeria Roman/Buenos Aires

Indeed, Argentina will be the first country where the vaccine, called Racotumomab, will be available starting in July after it was approved by Argentina’s National Administration of Medicines, Food and Medical Technology (ANMAT).

The vaccine does not prevent lung cancer. It is meant as a complement to conventional therapies such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy, and helps combat the cancer by activating the body’s immune system. As such, it will help treat one of the toughest cancers, which causes 9,000 deaths per year in Argentina alone.

It was designed and developed in Argentina with the participation of Cuban researchers over the past 18 years.

“When we started researching, our goal was to develop biological therapies that use the body’s immune system to fight cancer. We thought the product would be ready in five years, but it was much more difficult than we imagined. Still, we continued on. When we look back today, we can see it’s been a long road,” said Silvia Gold, co-head of the Grupo Insud, the consortium that developed the vaccine.

The consortium involves researchers from the public and private sector, including the Quilmes National University, the Angel Roffo Institute of Oncology, the Garrahan Pediatric Hospital, CONICET, Buenos Aires University, the Centre of Molecular Immunology in Cuba, and the Argentinian pharmaceutical company Elea Laboratories.

Since the beginning of the project to the completion of clinical trials, more than 100 people from different fields have been involved – from molecular biologists to clinical oncologists.

The drug is now patented in Argentina, the European Union and the United States. It will soon be available in Brazil and other Latin American countries, as well as, India, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia among others.

It all began with the study of substances called antigens, which are only found in human tumours. Given that they are not found in healthy cells, researchers thought that they could be targeted in a therapy to defeat tumours and prevent their dissemination.

From then on, the researchers concentrated on the development of a vaccine that could awaken the immune response in cancer patients and attack cancer cells. They made it so that the immune system would start to recognise the tumours as “strangers”.

The vaccine is an antibody that mimics the tumour’s antigens. Thus, “it makes the immune system work and act against the tumour, without affecting healthy cells. It produces cells and antibodies targeted against the tumour cells. This was demonstrated through in vitro and mice studies. We then went on to the clinical trials with volunteers in three stages,” explained Daniel Alonso, director of molecular oncology at the University of Quilmes and scientific director of the consortium that developed the vaccine.

Clinical trials involving 600 patients showed that the therapeutic vaccine can triple the percentage of patients who live two years after its application, compared to the control group that only received radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

Besides ANMAT’s approval for its commercialisation, the vaccine will be presented by Elea’s medical director Roberto Gomez at the annual congress for the American Society of Clinical Oncology.- Worldcrunch