THE pioneering Australian scientist who discovered a vaccine against cervical cancer is on the verge of creating the world’s first skin cancer vaccination.
Professor Ian Frazer, a former Australian of the Year, has revealed human trials of the vaccine will start next year – and it could be ready for widespread use as early as 2013.

As with the injection now given to millions of young girls each year to stop cervical cancer, children aged 10-12 would be given the vaccine to prevent skin cancer, Professor Frazer said.

Australia has the world’s highest rate of skin cancer, with more than 380,000 people diagnosed and 1600 dying from it each year. Professor Frazer will reveal the groundbreaking work at the Australian Health and Medical Research Congress in Brisbane tomorrow.

He said it would be rewarding to develop a vaccine for a cancer so prevalent in Australia. Testing on animals had shown the vaccine to be successful, prompting next year’s human trials, he said.

Hope forskin cancervaccineFrom Page 1“It’s an important challenge with a very major health benefit if it works,” he told the Sunday Mail. If we get encouraging results, we will try and push it on as fast as we can.

“It’s really a given that we try to focus on health problems which are significant ones.

“When you’re looking at treatments, your focus needs to be on diseases that are most common.”

The new skin-cancer vaccine works by targeting papillomavirus, a common skin infection that affects most people and can linger in the body, turning abnormal cells into cancer.

Prof Frazer and his team from the Diamantina Institute at the University of Queensland are focusing on preventing squamous-cell skin cancer, which is strongly linked to papillomavirus.

Squamous cell is the second most common skin cancer, affecting 137,600 people in Australia this year and killing 400.

It’s not yet known if melanomas, which are the most deadly form of skin cancer, are also caused by papillomavirus.

“My entire career has been focused on understanding the interaction between papillomavirus and the cancers they affect,” Prof Frazer said.

“We know it causes at least 5 per cent of all cancers globally, so one in 20 of the cancers that people get is caused by papillomavirus. It’s a huge issue.”

The new vaccine is part of a two-pronged approach to tackle skin cancer.

The other approach involves “switching off” one of the skin’s controls to allow killer cells to destroy potentially cancerous cells.

“Getting the vaccine is the easy part,” Prof Frazer said.

“We need to introduce this other component to change the setting in the local environment.

“The skin has a number of defences against the body’s own immune system.

“What we’re learning is the nature of those controls and how to turn them off.

“We can turn them off in animals and if we turn them off, the vaccine does its job.”

The next stage of trials will involve treating those patients with chronic disease and pre-cancerous lesions. The new vaccine is not the same as Gardasil – used against cervical cancer – and contains different ingredients, although both work in a similar way.

“It’s a conventional vaccine that contains a viral protein,” Prof Fraser said.

“It was specifically developed for this trial.”

He told Thursday’s St George Hospital 2008 symposium in southeast Sydney that more than 20 per cent of the world’s cancers were triggered by infection and they could therefore be prevented by immunisation.

But he acknowledged that the full extent of the role of papillomavirus in skin cancer had not yet been established.

“I don’t know how many skin cancers are caused by it,” he said.

“On pessimistic days I say 1 per cent, but on other days I think maybe all of them are.”

And despite his hopes, Prof Frazer emphasised that it would not mean vaccinated people could abandon measures to protect themselves from the sun.

“There’s always a danger of complacency,” he said. “A vaccine is not a replacement for prevention.”