The earliest attempts to treat cancer through immune stimulation – that is to say by stimulating the patient to produce his own protection – date right back to the end of the 19th century! Then, at the end of the 1960s various teams, in France in particular, conducted the first genuinely calibrated trials of the BCG vaccine to test this approach.
Next came “vaccines” prepared from cancer cells inactivated by x-rays and injected in the hope that the recipient’s body would produce its own specific antibodies.
“All this developed out of one brilliant idea”, explained Thierry Le Chevalier, vice president of the Oncology Development Centre at the GSK laboratories in Great Britain. “An approach that would give the body back the “key” to eliminating cancer cells without chemical or radiological assistance. And cancer cells only, unlike cytotoxins which in the process of destroying the cancer cells also cause collateral damage to the surrounding healthy tissue.
“However, these attempts have only ever produced fragmented and unconvincing results.” Which is why the scientific community maintains a priori a reserved attitude towards immunotherapy as a form of cancer treatment. Gene therapy gave rise to a new wave of hope during the 1990s but does not appear to have been any more successful at fulfilling its promise, mainly it seems because of its failure to act on specific, well individualized, recognisable targets.
The use of a specific cancer cell antigen – which by its very nature is never found in healthy cells – such as the antigen MAGE-A3, could represent a major advance in this field.
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