'Essential components now in place' for clinical testing of cancer vaccine strategies, experts say

Abstract

ACCORDING to experts at the Cancer Research Institute's "Cancer Vaccines 1994" symposium, held in New York, NY, medicine is entering a "new era of immunologically based treatments for cancer." The conference was the first in a planned series of biennial meetings on cancer vaccines. "We anticipate that this symposium will become the major forum for reporting on vaccine research and will help foster development of the first effective therapeutic cancer vaccine," said Jill O'Donnell-Tormey, PhD, executive director of the New York—based Cancer Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that supports research in cancer immunology. The institute is establishing a cancer vaccine trial registry to serve as a centralized source of information for the scientific and clinical communities about all ongoing vaccine trials. The registry will track progress in the field and maintain status reports on the various trials. Now that researchers are defining the structure of tumor peptides that are recognized