There's a Shot for That

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Two centuries ago Edward Jenner administered the first scientifically developed vaccine, injecting fluid from a dairymaid’s skin lesion into an 8-year-old boy. The English physician knew that dairymaids who contracted cowpox, a comparatively mild skin disease, became immune to the much deadlier smallpox, which at the time killed 400,000 Europeans a year. Jenner hoped the fluid from the cowpox lesion would somehow inoculate the boy against the smallpox scourge. ?His hunch proved correct. Today vaccines (vaccinia is Latin for “cowpox”) of all forms save 3 million lives per year worldwide, and at a bargain price. A measles shot, for instance, costs less than a dollar per dose.

By training the human immune system to recognize and ward off dangerous pathogens, vaccines can protect against disease for decades, or even for a lifetime. Preventive vaccines work by introducing harmless microbial chemical markers, known as antigens, which resemble the markers on living microbes. The antigens train the immune system to recognize and destroy those microbes should they ever appear in the body. By injecting cowpox antigens into his patients’ bloodstream, for instance, Jenner primed their immune systems to attack the similar smallpox virus.

Today medical scientists are taking ?Jenner’s ideas in new directions. They are exploiting a growing understanding of the immune system to develop therapeutic vaccines: ones aimed not at preventing infection but at rooting out established disease or even changing how the body functions. In the spring of last year, the FDA approved Provenge, a vaccine that beats back prostate cancer and is the first of the new generation of therapeutic vaccines to go into widespread use. That may be the trickle before the flood. A 2010 survey by the market analysis firm BCC Research identified 113 therapeutic vaccines in development, many already in human trials.

THE CANCER SHOT?

With a near-endless supply of patients willing to undergo novel treatments, cancer researchers have been among the most aggressive in experimenting with therapeutic vaccination. “Cancer vaccines are the stalking horses for therapeutic vaccines,” says cancer immunologist Lloyd Old. Based at the Cancer Research Institute in New York, Old is the director of the Cancer Vaccine Collaborative, an international program dedicated to fighting cancer from the inside out.

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