Coaxing cancer to defect

The immune system has a hard time attacking tumors because malignant cells do not express potent antigens that could elicit a strong immune response. Whereas most cancer vaccine strategies attempt to boost the body's response against weak antigens, a group from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine is taking a different tack by coaxing tumors to present previously unexpressed, tumor-specific antigens following inhibition of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay in cancer cells.¹

The challenges will be to specifically target tumor cells and not normal cells in order to avoid autoimmunity and to develop stable reagents for clinical use...