Disease-causing parasite forms anticancer vaccine

摘要

Antitumor vaccines that stimulate the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells are a promising strategy to treat and prevent cancer, but vaccines capable of achieving effective and long-lasting immunity remain elusive. Caroline Junqueira et al. (pp. 19695-19700) tackled this challenge by engineering a nonpatho-genic clone of Trypanosoma cruzi-the Chagas disease-causing parasite that induces a long-lived immune response—as a delivery vector for a tumor-associated antigen in hopes of eliciting a tumor-specific immune response. The authors found that T. cruzi expressing a tumor-associated antigen known as NY-ESO-1 induced strong, specific immune responses in human cells grown in culture and in mice.