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British Indian doctor leads international trial of bowel cancer vaccine
The trial will be available for just 44 patients around the world.
Tony Dhillon will be leading the first international trial of a vaccine of bowel cancer / Image: Nhs.surrey
British Indian doctor Tony Dhillon will be leading the first international trial of a vaccine to treat early bowel cancer.
According to a release by Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust the trial will be run by the Cancer Research UK Southampton clinical trials unit at the University of Southampton in collaboration with Trust and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide, Australia.
There will be 10 sites for patients to be enrolled – six in Australia and four in the UK, with a total of 44 patients to be enrolled in the study over an 18 month period.
“Dr Tony Dhillon, chief investigator of the trial and the Trust’s consultant medical oncologist, proposed the idea for the trial and has worked with Professor Tim Price in Australia for the last four years to develop the vaccine,” the release stated.
According to the NHS, the vaccine will be used to treat patients before surgery in hopes of the surgery being less invasive. Physicians also hope that the strength of the vaccine could support the immune system to respond if the cancer relapses in future.
Expressing confidence in the vaccine Dr Dhillon said, “We think that for a lot of patients, the cancer will have gone completely after this treatment. Patients will have an endoscopy, then a tissue sample will be tested to see if they are eligible for the trial. If they are, they will have three doses of the vaccine before having surgery to remove the cancer,” he elaborated.
Calling it a ground-breaking treatment Dr Dhillon added, “I feel as if we are on the edge of something really big here. The vaccine makes the immune system go after the cancer. It will be life changing because it means that potentially, patients may not need to have surgery and they may just have the vaccine.”
After the trials are completed, the vaccine will either be licensed for use or a larger study will be carried out.
Dhillon obtained his Bachelor of science in 1994, qualified in medicine from University College London in 1997 and obtained his PhD on cancer cell signalling from Imperial College London in 2009 funded by a CR-UK clinical training fellowship.
He has been a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Surrey County Hospital since 2014 and his main research interests are in liver cancers – primary and metastatic.
He has previously been a Wellcome Trust clinical fellow in the University of Oxford looking at gene regulation in varying chromosomal environments and senior lecturer in oncology at Imperial College London working on cell free DNA in lung cancer.
Bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, is the third most common cancer, with a worldwide annual incidence of over 1.2 million cases and a mortality rate of approximately 50 percent.
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