There are lots of treatments out there for Cancer and whilst they are all important, and many have some side effects, they do save lives. The University of Malta is performing research about the effectiveness of a cancer vaccine, led by Professor Pierre Schembri Wismayer. They created an autologous formalin-fixed modified immunotherapeutic vaccine for the treatment of solid tumours, including metastatic ones.
The Newspoint team spoke with Prof. Pierre Schembri Wismayer, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine & Surgery who has just recovered from a type of leukaemia. “30 years ago this was considered as 100% fatal, which would mean that I would presently be 6 feet under” he said. However nowadays this type is 90% plus curable (not just a remission), due to a simple modification of vitamin A which is a kind of targeted therapy. “Unfortunately - Cancers are very different and not all are as treatable as others. Even within each individual cancer, different cells are very different amongst themselves,” continued Prof. Schembri Wismayer.
The vaccine we are working on is made of modified tissue from a cancer. Many cancers are mutating and changing all the time, so rather than focus on an immune reaction against a single protein (like the Covid vaccine for example targets the Spike protein) and since the proteins of a cancer are often very similar to those of our normal cells, we use whole parts of the cancer, with all all the proteins and DNA and RNA inside to make the vaccine.
This is not a completely new idea, just a better modification of it. Prof. Ohno's group in Japan developed the first kind of formalin-fixed tumour vaccine and has published cases where it has cured serious brain cancers and people with breast cancer metastasised widespread to bone (both of which were considered incurable). However, in these cases, the vaccine was used alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Ours has cured animals with cancer on its own. Prof. Ohno’s vaccine is offered in a private clinic in Dusseldorf, Germany at and multiple clinics in Japan. The treatment is not cheap but is cheaper than many modern super-expensive immunotherapies (cancer treatment that helps your immune system fight cancer).
“The costs to implement our version of this treatment are huge due to quality control issues. For example, in a review of the vaccine I am developing, a UK assessor company said it would likely cost more than 130 million Euros to produce the clinical trials needed for this to become an actual treatment” Prof. Schembri Wismayer said. “To the point that I believe society is sabotaging itself, putting brakes on developing things, even for incurable diseases, such that only big pharma have the deep pockets capable of financing such a development. I am happy to have recently read about an organisation called "Protas'' which sped up trials enormously to get rapid results for Covid treatment”.
Other primary investigators and post-docs including Dr Analisse Cassar, Prof. Marion Zammit Mangion, Dr Lucienne Vassallo Gatt and Prof. Jean Calleja Agius, Dr Sherif Suleiman are studying how to treat other cancers, using natural extracts coming from insects, plants and other small animals. Some of this latter research has already been published whilst further work is ongoing to find the active ingredient so that this can be patented with the help of the Knowledge Transfer Office and possibly developed into new drugs in the future. Many other colleagues including Dr David Saliba, Dr Byron Baron, Dr Vanessa Petroni, Prof. Anthony Fenech, Prof. Therese Hunter, Prof. Godfrey Grech, Prof. Mauro Pessia and Prof. Christian Scerri also study cancer at the University.
Professor Schembri Wismayer concluded by saying “I would love to see a good manufacturing facility set up in Malta, to see people like myself, and other colleagues at the University, offer one-off treatments to patients in those cases, when other standard treatments do not work. Another thing which is easier to do and can be thus done sooner is work with all local vets to treat any pets and farm animals with inoperable cancers”.
