New hope for tumor vaccines

The way a tumor cell dies determines its immune-stimulating capacity, according to a study by Casares and colleagues on page 1691. Tumor cells that die from exposure to the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, they show, become highly immunogenic and induce the regression of established tumors when injected into mice.

Inactivated tumor cells have long been considered to be attractive vaccine immunogens, in part because whole-cell vaccines would allow each patient to be immunized against his or her own tumor. But this approach has met with limited success, probably because traditional ways of inducing tumor cell death—by irradiation or freeze-thawing—somehow strip the cells of their immunogenicity.

Many vaccine strategists have instead turned to T cell-inducing dendritic cell (DC) vaccines, in which DCs are grown from a patient's blood, pulsed with tumor antigens, and reinjected. But the...