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For more than three decades, Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have pursued an ambitious idea: that vaccines could train the immune system to recognize and fight cancer. Now, a landmark phase 3 clinical trial of a personalized melanoma vaccine shows that this approach can improve outcomes for patients. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center was among the clinical centers that participated in the multicenter study.

"Vaccines have been among the most transformative advances in modern medicine," says Mark Yarchoan, M.D., associate professor of oncology, in an editorial published Nov. 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine, accompanying the melanoma trial results. "However, until now, efforts to develop vaccines that directly target established cancers have been largely unsuccessful."

The clinical trial results mark a turning point for a field shaped by decades of fundamental discoveries and many clinical setbacks. Among its pioneers is Elizabeth Jaffee, M.D., the Dana and Albert "Cubby" Broccoli Professor of Oncology and deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, whose work helped establish therapeutic cancer vaccination as a promising strategy to fight cancer.

"For years, we believed we could teach the immune system to recognize cancer, but we didn't yet have all of the tools to make this work in patients," says Jaffee, who is also co-director of the Kimmel Cancer Center's Skip Viragh Center for Pancreatic Cancer and associate director of its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

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