Work carried out by the Hospital del Mar Research Institute has made it possible to identify a set of small molecules specific to liver tumors that could become key to the development of vaccines against cancer.
These are very small proteins that are only expressed by cancer cells. The identification was made thanks to the combination of tumor data and healthy tissue from more than a hundred liver cancer patients. In fact, these small molecules are generated from genes that until recently were thought not to have the ability to encode proteins, but thanks to new technologies it has become possible to see this.
In the study, carried out in collaboration with Cima Universitat de Navarra and in collaboration with Pompeu Fabra University, a combination of different computational techniques such as transcriptomics, translational science and proteomics was used, together with laboratory experiments aimed at studying the immune response.
Cancer vaccine development relies on the immune system’s ability to recognize something that isn’t part of the body as foreign. Mutations in cancer cells generate foreign peptides, which alert the immune system. The problem is cancers with low mutation rates, such as liver cancer. Studying tiny proteins, which have been difficult to detect until now, offers an alternative.
In this regard, Marta Espinosa, researcher at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute, explained that the work shows that there are a large number of microproteins that are expressed exclusively in cancer cells and that could serve to develop new treatments.
For her part, Bori Fortes, a researcher at the University of Sima in Navarra and CIBERehd, added that they have observed that some of these microproteins are able to stimulate the immune system, which could generate a response against cancer cells. This response could be enhanced with vaccines similar to those for the coronavirus, but that produce these microproteins. These vaccines could stop or reduce the growth of tumors.
In this case, unlike other types of vaccines that rely on specific mutations in each patient, the treatment can be used in multiple people, since the exact same protein has been seen in multiple patients.
The researchers stress that using this vaccine could be relatively simple, although research into its application has not yet begun. “That is our goal,” they add.
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