By: Tiffany Han

Pioneers are people who explore brand-new areas and methods. There are cooking pioneers, geological pioneers, and scientific pioneers. There are also medical pioneers. Catherine Wu is an example of a medical pioneer. She tries to find a better way to fight cancer. Wu thinks that a personalized vaccine would be more effective against cancer than a normal vaccine after witnessing a bone marrow transplant help a leukemia (blood cancer) patient.

Catherine Wu and her team in Boston decided to test this concept. For the first study, they gathered six patients with advanced melanoma, a dangerous type of skin cancer, and decided to give them a seven-shot course of personalized vaccines. The team analyzed each individual patient’s cancer characteristics. Then, according to the DNA in each patient, Wu and her team personalized the vaccines. In 2015, the course started. By 2017, four of the patients showed no sign of cancer. The remaining two patients were in a more advanced state than the rest, but the course prevented the cancer from spreading. After four more doses of the vaccine, in 2021, all patients were declared cancer-free.

The study made an incredible breakthrough. It proved that customized vaccines can indeed help cancer patients fight cancer. For this discovery, Catherine Wu and her team won numerous prizes. The most recent prize was in February, and was the Sjöberg Prize, a prestigious award. Wu will surely continue to amaze us with her ideas, and might be a future version of a famous medical pioneer, Louis Pasteur.