The use of vaccines to eliminate infectious diseases is one of the greatest achievements in human history; however, the dream of using vaccines to prevent or treat human cancer remains largely unfulfilled. The overall goal of this project is to explore a new therapeutic strategy to fulfill this dream by altering cancer cells so they can be recognized and destroyed by the immune system. We will develop a new technology to deliver infectious virus-related peptides specifically to targeted tumors. This will trick the human immune system to recognize cancer cells as infectious virus-infected cells and launch an immune response against them by reawakening immune cells developed through previous n...

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The use of vaccines to eliminate infectious diseases is one of the greatest achievements in human history; however, the dream of using vaccines to prevent or treat human cancer remains largely unfulfilled. The overall goal of this project is to explore a new therapeutic strategy to fulfill this dream by altering cancer cells so they can be recognized and destroyed by the immune system. We will develop a new technology to deliver infectious virus-related peptides specifically to targeted tumors. This will trick the human immune system to recognize cancer cells as infectious virus-infected cells and launch an immune response against them by reawakening immune cells developed through previous natural viral infection or through vaccination against the virus during childhood. We have developed a novel drug system to deliver virus-related peptides to cancer cells by encapsulating the peptides in tiny fat-like particles (liposomes) that have trastuzumab on their surface. Trastuzumab is an FDA-approved antibody drug that targets human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2), a protein marker overexpressed on the cell surface in approximately 20% of human breast cancers. In the current project, we will test the feasibility of our novel system by assessing its antitumor activity, elucidating the mechanisms underlying antitumor activity, and evaluating the system’s safety and toxicity. We will use influenza A virus-related peptides and deliver them to tumors in mice with preexisting immunity due to influenza A virus infection. Successful completion of the work will be highly significant and impactful, because it could create a new paradigm of cancer immunotherapy. In principle, the strategy can be adapted to treat a wide variety of human cancers through delivery of peptides derived from vaccines that have successfully prevented other infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and measles, and inclusion of antibodies targeting other cancer cell surface protein markers.

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