00:00 Sign
for Nottingham City Hospital – pan to approach road|
Prof.
Lindy Durrant approaches laboratory
Prof.
Durrant enters lab and joins researcher
Guide Voice: Research staff at the University
of Nottingham in the United Kingdom are in the front line of the
battle against cancer. They’re developing vaccines designed
to stimulate a patients own immune response to fight their
cancerous cells - a long, painstaking process.
00:16 SOT: Professor Lindy Durrant – Professor of
Cancer and Immuno-therapy. University of Nottingham -
“Promising in the lab doesn’t necessarily translate
into the clinic, in that what we try to do obviously in the
laboratory is set up a number of tests which will predict
what’s actually going to happen when we go into
patients. So we can show we can stimulate T cells and
antibody responses that kill tumour cells in the laboratory very
efficiently, that target blood vessels and only target blood
vessels in tumour. So we mock up as much as we can. But when
you actually put these things into patients it depends on the
patient’s own immune response and their ability to
respond. Clinical trials are absolutely vital and
they’re not necessarily the end point”.
00:51 2
shot Prof. Durrant & researcher
c.u.
computer screen
Profile
– Prof Durrant indicates at screen
Guide Voice: Professor Durrant and her team are
working on a double vaccine. One part stimulates the patients own
immune response to fight their cancer, the second part of the
vaccine will target the blood cells feeding the tumour in an
attempt to starve it. Vaccination seems such an obvious approach.
Why hasn’t it been used before?
01:09 SOT: Prof. Lindy Durrant:
-“You really have to understand how to target
the immune response, how to make it work in that your immune system
doesn’t normally attack your normal cells. If it went round
attacking your normal cells, basically you’d self destruct
and that would be a huge problem. So there are a lot of mechanisms
there to prevent what we’re trying to do and we’ve had
to try and dissect them one at a time. And, in cancer
patients, overturn them such that the immune system now sees the
cancer as an infection, as a foreign organism and attack it but
then control it so it then doesn’t go on to destroy the
individual.”
01:40 Researcher
in lab
Researcher
emptying liquid into tray
Wide
of researcher at ventilation cabinet, pan to researcher at
desk
Researcher
placing samples in liquid
c.u.
placing samples in liquid
c.u.
face
Guide Voice: The team’s initial
breakthrough came in 1984. A patient operated on for bowel cancer
found the cancer had spread to his liver and the condition was
inoperable. Against the odds he survived, healthily, for 7 years,
enabling a series of monoclonal antibody images to be taken to
track the progress of his cancer. The third of these triggered his
immune response.
02:01 SOT: Prof. Lindy Durrant
- “So he actually made an immune response to the
mono-clonal antibody which was actually an anti-tumour
effect. And he actually eventually survived seven years with
very advanced disease. And we thought well that’s very
intriguing, something’s going on here. If we could actually
capture the cells that are doing it in this particular person then
we could produce a vaccine from him. We could actually
immunise other patients with that same vaccine and have that same
effect. So that’s where the work began and indeed
I had a very talented student who managed to take those cells,
immortalise them, produce the vaccine in large quantities and
we’ve now immunised over three hundred
patients”.
02:40 Exterior,
Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham
Wide,
Margaret Wallis in examining room
c.u.
hand on chair arm
c.u.
face
c.u.
hand on chair arm
Guide Voice: Patients like Margaret Wallis who
was treated with the vaccine, called 105AD7, as part of the
clinical trials. She’d had chemotherapy for a previous
cancer and didn’t want to repeat the experience, opting for a
new treatment instead.
02:55 SOT: Margaret Wallis, Cancer
Patient: - “Well I, I didn’t fancy
going for chemo again. Well I thought it might help somebody else.
It didn’t sound too bad, a little vaccination. It’s
only a few seconds isn’t it and it’s over and it has
been really good. I mean –I’ve had no side
effects. None at all.”
03:14 c.u.
Bunsen burner and flame
Wide,
researcher with Petri dish
c.u.
hand preparing Petri dish
Look
up through dish at researcher
Focus
pull on researcher’s face
Guide Voice: Now attention has turned to
targeting tumour blood vessels.
For a tumour to grow it needs a good blood supply. A combination
of vaccines - one targeting the tumour cells and another targeting
the blood vessels – means it may become possible to kill
large tumours.
There are many laboratory tests and clinical trials ahead but
does Professor Durrant think such vaccines will eventually lead to
a cure for cancer?
03:39 SOT: Prof. Lindy Durrant: “ The
simple answer is no, there’s never going to be a simple
antibiotic that we give to everybody to prevent cancer.Having said
that, there are a number of very successful approaches already out
there – surgery, chemotherapy and a huge number of new
developments that are going to help individual people in individual
ways. So for instance this vaccine that we’re dealing
with probably will help some patients with major solid cancers -
about twenty per cent of them.But there will be other things that
will help other people as we go through. If you look at
children’s cancer for instance, twenty years ago we used to
cure about ten per cent of children’s cancer. Now
we’re up to ninety per cent. That’s a huge
improvement. We’ve got a huge way to go with adult
cancer, which is obviously a much bigger problem, but we are
getting there”.
04:24 View
through glass panel to laboratory
Reverse
2 shot at computer
Wide
of Prof. Durrant & researcher at computer
2
shot of faces
Guide Voice: It’s much too early to say
how successful this new double-attack vaccine will be. Its
development is a painstaking process of trial and error. One
thing’s for certain – any success will be its own
reward.
04:36
Ends
