Scientists in the UK developing the world's first vaccine to prevent ...

Scientists at the University of Oxford are working on the world’s first ovarian cancer vaccine, aiming to prevent the disease that kills nearly 26,000 women in the European Union every year.

The vaccine, called OvarianVax, would train the immune system to recognise and fight back against the earliest stages of ovarian cancer, one of the most common forms of cancer among women which often isn’t detected until a later stage when it’s harder to treat.

The vaccine will be targeted toward women with genetic mutations that can raise the risk of ovarian cancer. 

Some women with these mutations opt for surgery to remove their ovaries and fallopian tubes to try to prevent the cancer, though it makes them unable to have children.

"We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer," Dr Ahmed Ahmed, an Oxford gynaecological oncologist and head of the OvarianVax project, said in a statement.

"Teaching the immune system to recognise the very early signs of cancer is a tough challenge," he added. "But we now have highly sophisticated tools, which give us real insights into how the immune system recognises ovarian cancer".

Ahmed’s team will try to determine how well the immune system recognises different proteins on the surface of ovarian cancer cells, and do lab tests to measure how effectively the vaccine can kill organoids, which are tiny cancer models grown from tumour tissue taken from patients.

If these early tests are successful, the researchers will move forward with clinical trials to test how well the vaccine works in people.

The project could lead to "crucial discoveries in the lab which will realise our ambitions to improve ovarian cancer survival," Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of the non-profit Cancer Research UK, said in a statement.

Cancer Research UK will fund the OvarianVax research with up to £600,000 (€719,960), and cautioned that it could still take “many years” before the vaccines are available to patients.

Vaccines to prevent other forms of cancer could also reach patients in the coming years. 

In March, for example, Oxford scientists announced they were working on a vaccine for lung cancer, using similar technology used to develop their COVID-19 shot with drugmaker AstraZeneca.

Meanwhile, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine could nearly eliminate cervical cancer in the next generation.

Since Scotland launched its HPV immunisation campaign in 2008, for example, there have been no cases of cervical cancer among women who were fully vaccinated at ages 12 or 13.

Vaccines could also be coming to treat people who already have cancer. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is running a clinical trial to test personalised vaccines that target the specific mutations of thousands of cancer patients.

For that study, patients have their tumours removed in surgery before getting a personalised vaccine that researchers hope will prompt an immune response to recognise and destroy any remaining cancer cells.