The experimental vaccine is given to patients once they have had surgery to remove the tumour.
Professor Mark Saunders, consultant oncologist who is leading on the clinical trial at The Christie, said: “The vaccine is a personalised one.
“It gets his body’s immune system to actually fight the cancer. Hopefully it will stop it coming back.”
He said the vaccine was being tested for colon cancer patients but “you could also take the antigens from other cancers and make vaccines for other patients as well”.
He described the vaccine trial as: “a really big advance” but added: “We have to show that it works first.
“Until we reach the end of the trial and work out how many people are still alive, we won’t really know if it works – but it is a wonderful idea.”
Bowel cancer is responsible for about 16,000 deaths in the UK each year.
The German pharmaceutical company BioNTech SE is developing the vaccine with Genetech, a member of the Roche Group.
The trial is recruiting patients in the UK and the United States.
