Skip to main content

Soon we will have cancer vaccines created under genomic guidance: Dr Pramod K Srivastava

Soon we will have cancer vaccines created under genomic guidance: Dr Pramod K Srivastava

In an interview with ETHealthworld, Dr Pramod K Srivastava, Prof & Director of the Centre for Immunotherapy of Cancer & Infectious Diseases, Connecticut, US, talks about the role and opportunities in genomic research and the making of cancer vaccine.

You have been associated with clinical research right from the 90s. Tell us about the opportunities that genomics offers today?

Around 1990's there was no genomics in cancer immunology or cancer immunotherapy. The whole idea of genomics coming into it has come about only in the last 5 or 6 years because only then could we look at the entire genome of a patient.

What we can do today is to take the cancer of a patient, take their normal tissues and read the entire genome both normal and the cancerous within a week and we can compare how it is different within another week. So basically in two weeks time in surgery or from biopsy we can pinpoint all the positions where this cancer is different from the normal tissue.

This capacity didn't exist in a practical way until 2008-2009 but now sequenced genome is pretty much at the cost of a MRI scan, little more than that. Today, it is like a whole different world with different languages, different level of precision and different levels of possibilities.

Can cancer vaccine be a reality today?

Cancer vaccines are certainly not a reality today but it could they be a reality in 10 years time. It is not a question of if but it is a question of when and how and where. The way we treat cancer today is not very effective.

Today in terms of outcome there isn't much of difference and the reason is that the things that we use for these treatments like chemotherapy and surgery they don't discriminate between normal tissues and cancers in any real way. It kills cancers and normal tissues also and the whole goal is to traverse that very normal lane and damage the cancer more than damaging the normal tissue.

​Continue reading...​


ᐧ
ᐧ

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BE guidelines regarding investigator

BE guidelines recommend investigator should possess appropriate medical qualification, experience for conducting pharmacokinetic studies Can chairperson of EC directly write to sponsor to clarify some of the queries of clinical trial raised in EC meeting? Dr. Sreevatsa Please see an extract from FDA's comment on IRB-sponsor relationship. The interrelationship and interaction between the research sponsor (e.g., drug, biologic and device manufacturers), the clinical investigator and the Institutional Review Board (IRB) may be very complex. The regulations do not prohibit direct sponsor-IRB contacts, although, the sponsor-IRB interaction customarily occurs through the investigator who conducts the clinical study. The clinical investigator generally provides the communication link between the IRB and the sponsor. Such linkage is agreed to by the sponsors and investigators when they sign forms FDA-1571 and FDA-1572, respectively, for drug and biologic studies or a...
Post a Comment
Read more

ICH GCP requires EC members to be independent of investigator and sponsor to avoid conflicts of interest

Can an Ethics Committee member e.g. layman/chairman or anyone in the committee participate in the trial as a subject? Vidya If an Ethics Committee member becomes a trial subject on a trial that he/she was involved in approving then there has been a major conflict of interest. The following situations need to be considered: ● IEC member reviews study without any prior knowledge of the study, votes, and then afterwards is approached by clinical research team to participate. Possibly this is OK but the member should no longer be part of the IEC that reviews that study. This will be difficult in practice, so therefore it is not advisable. ● IEC member already knows about the study and is voting in order to be able to participate. This is clearly not acceptable and made worse if there is additional financial incentive for the study (e.g. volunteer study). ICH GCP requires Ethics Committee members to be independent of the investigator and the sponsor to avoid confl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Combination Vaccine for Kids withdrawn

A vaccine that combines conventional MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) with Chikenpox has been withdrawn in the United States due to a higher rate of seizures in children. In a study children aged 12 to 23 months who received the combined MMR cum Chickenpox vaccine had double the rate of seizures compared to children who got separate vaccine for MMR and chickenpox. This equates to one additional case of convulsion per 2000 vaccinations.
Post a Comment
Read more