OTTAWA ¿ A team led by Jim Richards, director of the immunochemistry program at the National Research Council of Canada¿s Institute for Biological Sciences in Ottawa, is joining the C$350 million (US$239 million) Pasteur Merieux Connaught Canada (PMCC) Cancer Vaccine Network.

In making the disclosure, Mark Lievonen, president of PMCC, said the network, which was initiated two years ago, continues to add researchers in an effort to find, develop and market therapeutic vaccines for cancer by the year 2007.

The Ottawa group becomes the fifth team of researchers to be funded under the program, joining teams from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg; Dalhousie University in Halifax; the Sunnybrook & Women¿s College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto; and Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

The initial targets of the project are melanoma, colorectal cancer and bladder cancer, but preliminary work on other cancers, such as breast and prostate, is also underway, said Mr. Lievonen. In the usual sense, a vaccine prevents disease by preparing the immune system for a possible later attack. Therapeutic cancer vaccines would be used to ¿turn on¿¿ the immune systems of people who already have the disease and increase the potential power of current treatments.

The concept of such vaccines is based on the idea that tumor cells display distinct molecules that can be recognized by the immune system.

The science has evolved to the point where the utility and potential of cancer vaccines is really possible, Lievonen said. The key challenge is to establish proof of concept for some candidate vaccines over the next couple of years.

Richards¿ team will receive C$1.1 million over the next two years to identify and study new tumor-associated molecules as candidate targets for cancer immunotherapy.

In particular, the researchers will seek to identify and characterize the antigens associated with prostate cancer using immunological techniques to find the antigens, and mass spectrometry to identify their composition.

The immunochemistry section of the Institute for Biological Sciences is recognized internationally for its molecular level studies of carbohydrate cell surface antigens.