A personalized vaccine to fight cancer? It may sound like science fiction or wishful thinking, but it is an idea whose time may finally be coming thanks in part to the work of Nina Bhardwaj ’75, director of immunotherapy at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai in New York City.
The promise of a cancer vaccine has lured researchers for decades, but there have been only a few successes. The vaccines that have been developed target specific viruses known to cause cancer, such as the human papillomavirus and hepatitis B, which can trigger cancer in the cervix and liver. Most cancers, however, are not caused by viruses. Nina’s research has been with another promising kind of vaccine—a therapeutic vaccine—which primes a person’s own immune system to fight off cancer recurrence....