THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 28, 1996 TAG: 9602280365
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
One day, perhaps, a vaccine for some types of cancer will be as common as a shot to prevent polio.
That's the hope of Dr. Craig L. Slingluff Jr. and his colleagues at the University of Virginia. This month, they start to pursue that goal with trials of a vaccine for melanoma, the most virulent form of skin cancer.
Slingluff, a Virginia Beach native, was back in his hometown Tuesday to talk to staff members at Virginia Beach General Hospital. The talk was part of a new alliance between the hospital's Coastal Cancer Center and the university that will give Hampton Roads residents access to some of the trials being done at U.Va.
If the vaccine works, it would be used first in people who have the disease, to prevent it from spreading. Eventually, this vaccine - and others being developed in similar projects around the world - might become standard preventive medicine.
Melanoma isn't the most common cancer. It attacked an estimated 34,000 Americans last year, far less than the number struck by lung, prostate or breast cancer.
But Slingluff will not forget the day when he saw three patients, all in their 30s, who were dying of the disease. Half of the victims of melanoma are younger than 40, often people with young children.
``It's particularly easy to hate this disease,'' he said.
Vaccinating against cancer means using the body's own defenses to fight the invader.
The U.Va. team gave the first vaccine injection to a patient on Feb. 20. The trials are in the earliest phase of testing on humans; researchers are trying to see whether the medicine generally works the way it's supposed to, and whether it poses any dangers to patients.
If this phase goes well, doctors will see whether it reduces the death rate for people getting the shot.
Before they could get to this phase, Slingluff and his colleagues had to find the ``holy grail,'' a particular example of a substance called a peptide.
Peptides are fragments of proteins that stick to the surface of cells.
Cancer cells create some unique peptides that aren't found on normal cells. These peptides are a kind of red flag, signaling the body's immune system to attack.
Researchers had to sort through about 20,000 different types of peptides before they found six or so unique to melanoma cells, then picked one type that seemed most effective at triggering the immune system.
Sometimes the immune system response is enough on its own to kill the melanoma. Doctors have seen spontaneous remission of the disease.
But for some reason, the immune system often doesn't do a good enough job, possibly because the cancer cells can trick the body into tolerating them.
Then the cancer spreads to other parts of the body, until there's too much to remove with surgery.
The vaccine, if it works, floods a lot of the red-flag peptides into a patient's system, so the immune system learns to recognize them and seek them out anywhere in the body.
The peptides are accompanied by a combination of other chemicals that causes inflammation at the site of the injection.
The inflammation kicks the immune system into gear and makes sure it looks for the peptides. ILLUSTRATION: MOTOYA NAKAMURA/The Virginian-Pilot
Dr. Craig L. Slingluff's U.Va. team gave the first melanoma vaccine
injection Feb. 20.
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KEYWORDS: CANCER SKIN CANCER VACCINE by CNB