How often might an individualized vaccine need to be developed to treat cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Individualized cancer vaccines based on the specific set of mutations someone has are now in clinical trials, with William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, predicting they will soon be commonplace. Yet because a cancer changes its mutations over time, more than one vaccine per person may be needed.

Nelson: There may be things the immune system can deal with and what you see coming up is the things that couldn't deal with. The other side of this is if you look at people who've had incredibly effective immune responses to CAR-T cells if they're administered or to immune checkpoint inhibitors but they relapse in the future what do they look like? They often have immune escape mechanisms, so yes if it responds and then progresses despite whatever you did with an intact immune system you have to come up with another trick.  :27

Nelson says as the technology continues to advance producing such vaccines become less and less of a technological hurdle, and will also become less expensive. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.