World’s 1st Ovarian Cancer ‘Preventative Vaccine’ in Development

£600,000 given to fund a new jab for women, designed to work in a similar way to the HPV vaccine, which has been the subject of multiple lawsuits.

A paediatrician prepares a dose of the HPV vaccine in Caracas on April 28, 2023. Yuri Cortez / AFP

Researchers at the University of Oxford have been awarded £600,000 from Cancer Research UK to create the world’s first vaccine designed to prevent ovarian cancer.

Those involved with the research say that the jab in development, known as OvarianVax, will work by teaching the immune system to recognise and attack the earliest stages of ovarian cancer.

The news of the latest in a raft of cancer jabs in development came in the same week as a new test said to be able to detect 96 percent of ovarian cancers was also announced.

Around 7,500 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year in the UK, and it is the sixth most common cancer in females. Scientists believe that women with  “faulty” BRCA1 genes have a higher ovarian cancer risk, and to a lesser extent in women with a faulty BRCA2 gene, compared to women who do not carry these variants.

“We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer,” Professor Ahmed Ahmed, lead for the OvarianVax project, said in a statement.

“OvarianVax could offer the solution to prevent cancer in women at high risk. Teaching the immune system to recognise the very early signs of cancer is a tough challenge. But we now have highly sophisticated tools, which give us real insights into how the immune system recognises ovarian cancer.”

The scientists will first attempt to establish which proteins on the surface of early-stage ovarian cancer cells are recognised most by the immune system and how effective the proposed vaccine is at killing mini-models of the cancer in the lab, called organoids.

If this stage of the research is considered successful, the team will then begin working on clinical trials of the vaccine. The intention is that in the future, women considered to be at high risk of ovarian cancer could be offered this vaccine to help prevent the disease.

Similar to HPV Vaccine

The way in which the ovarian cancer jab is intended to work is similar to the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which it is claimed trains the immune system to recognize and eliminate HPV-infected cells, thereby preventing cervical cancer.

There have been multiple reported problems with the HPV vaccine, branded as Gardasil and manufactured by Merck, including numerous lawsuits brought by the parents of young girls who have allegedly been killed or seriously harmed by the jab.

In 2013, the Japanese government stopped recommending the HPV jab, just before it became part of the national immunisation programme, after multiple reports of girls suffering serious harm after being given it.

While the UK government maintains that the HPV jab is safe and effective, a study from March this year published in the journal Vaccine found that adolescent girls who had the jab were 4.4 times more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than those who were not vaccinated. Similarly, vaccinated adolescent girls had a 2.76 times higher chance of developing juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

In the United States, more than 150 cases are pending as part of a multi-district litigation against Merck, with two new “wrongful death” lawsuits filed in February this year by mothers who allege their daughters died after receiving the Gardasil shot.

It is not currently proposed that the ovarian cancer vaccine in development would be routinely offered to all women, and it is expected to take many years for the jab to reach a point where it is widely offered to those labelled as being at risk of ovarian cancer.

The risk of developing ovarian cancer increases with age, with more than half of all cases in the UK in women aged 65 and over. According to the NHS, the risk is also higher in women who have previously had breast or bowel cancer, or have undergone radiotherapy treatment for any previous cancer.

The risk of ovarian cancer is also higher in women who are overweight or who smoke, and those who take hormone replacement therapy after the menopause. It is also slightly higher in those women who have ovulated more throughout their lifetime, meaning those who started their periods earlier, went through the menopause later, or did not have children.

It is still possible for women to get ovarian cancer even after having their ovaries removed, because it can also affect the fallopian tubes or the lining inside the stomach.

‘Long Way to Go’

According to Cancer Research, the estimated lifetime risk of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer is 1 in 56 (2 percent) for women born in 1961 in the UK, with the rate for this particular form of the disease remaining stable since the early 1990s.

Ahmed told the PA news agency that, if the vaccine development and trials prove successful, he would expect to start seeing an impact within the next five years.

Asked if ovarian cancer could be wiped out with the new vaccine, he said: “Absolutely—that would be the aim. We still have a long way to go but it is a really exciting time. I’m very optimistic myself.”

He added: “The idea is, if you give the vaccine, these tiny tumours will hopefully either reduce, shrink really significantly, or disappear. That would give us the sign that the vaccine is working.”

The next stage would then be to include women with BRCA mutations and a wider general population of healthy women to see whether “the vaccine would be suitable for all” in preventing ovarian cancer, Ahmed said.