Dr. Vinod Balachandran

She hiked up Mount Etna last year to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary.

She is a picture of vibrancy.

When we think of vaccines, we think of vaccines for infectious diseases.

In that scenario, what you're doing is you're teaching the immune system to recognize a virus or a bacteria that has yet to infect your body.

The majority of cancer vaccines are used as a therapy.

Most of them are given to patients who have cancer in some way or form with an intent to treat their cancer.

In this particular scenario, we use the vaccines to teach the immune system to recognise pancreatic cancers in an effort to prevent their reoccurrence after surgery.

And they're described as personalised.

What does that mean?

Personalized refers to the fact that each individual patient's cancer vaccine is custom designed for that individual based upon individual genetic analysis of their tumor as well as genetic characteristics of the patient.

Why is pancreatic cancer such a killer?

The figures are terrible for survival as they stand, aren't they?

90% of patients with pancreatic cancer die within five years of diagnosis with current treatments.

And it is projected to soon become the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States in the next year.

Tell me why there's such cause for optimism about this treatment.

In this study, part of the excitement is around the fact that you can, in fact, teach the immune system to recognize pancreatic cancer.

And not only that, you can do it in a very potent and durable way.

So you can make a very strong immune response that has all of the requisite features you would think needed to be able to treat cancer.

And excitingly, although this is a small clinical trial, what we find is if we can make this immune response in patients, patients are living much longer.

So this is an exciting proof of concept that...