Vaccination has provided efficient protection against infectious diseases. So, can cancer occurrence also be prevented by immunization with a prophylactic vaccine?

A study from Prof. MENG Songdong’s group showed that placenta-derived heat shock protein gp96 associates multiple embryonic antigens, which have striking similarity to tumor antigens. Immunization with placental gp96 in mice and rat induced tumor-specific T cell responses and T memory immunity, and provided protection against melanoma and breast cancer xenografts, as well as carcinogen-induced and spontaneous breast cancer.

Moreover, they found that human placental gp96 also associates multiple T cell epitopes, including tumor antigens such as HER1 and MUC1. These results indicate that placenta-derived gp96 may serve as a universal prophylactic cancer vaccine.

Clinical autopsies and detections have revealed that most healthy people may carry in situ tumors in their body, but the majority will not develop cancer, which is largely due to immune surveillance of our body, especially T cell-mediated immunity and tumor cell clearance. The breakdown of immune surveillance will directly lead to progression of harmless in situ tumors to a lethal form of cancer.

The study by Prof. MENG’s group thereby provides a proof-of-principle for effective prophylactic cancer vaccination for multivalent protection in humans, especially for those with a high risk of development of cancer.

Conceivably, vaccination of a prophylactic cancer vaccine, for example, placenta-derived gp96, will efficiently boost tumor-specific T cell and T memory cell responses and greatly decrease the incidence of cancer in human. It is possible that cancer occurrence can be controlled by prophylactic immunization, like infectious diseases.

The above study has been published on line in Scientific Reports.