Vaccine to prevent ovarian cancer could be in pipeline

The world’s first vaccine to prevent ovarian cancer is being developed in the UK and could save thousands of lives, eventually wiping out the disease, researchers claim.

- REBECCA THOMAS & JANE KIRBY

Scientists at the University of Oxford are creating OvarianVax, a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognise and attack the earliest stages of ovarian cancer. The hope is that the jab could be given to women preventatively on the NHS with the aim of eliminating the disease, which kills around 4,100 women in the UK each year.

Cancer charities have hailed the research as having the potential to save thousands of lives, and to save women with a BRCA gene mutation from having to have their ovaries removed.

The news comes after announcements earlier this year that scientists at the University of Oxford had secured funding to develop a vaccine that could prevent lung cancer. Experts have likened the potential impact of OvarianVax to that of the HPV vaccine, which is on its way to eliminating cervical cancer.

Professor Ahmed Ahmed, director of the Ovarian Cancer Cell Laboratory at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oxford, said he hoped patients in clinical trials could benefit within four to five years, but added that it would take “many years” for the vaccine to come into general use.

Prof Ahmed said that “while the full-blown timeline” for a vaccine being approved “might be many years away”, the “impact that it would have, if it’s successful, would hopefully be much sooner”. He said that, through the clinical trials, he would hope to start seeing the impact of the vaccine “in four or five years on the healthy population”.