Universal Vaccine Shot for Cancer
Eshan Maitra
Much like getting polio shots as a child for eliminating any risk in the future; scientists are on towards making the same kind of vaccine for cancer! That not only cures a certain type but all of cancerous tumor build up in body. That is why it is call universal! Soon, we can believe that cancer will be as extinct as Small Pox.
Led by researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany working behind this project, reports in Nature, “Such vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumor antigen can be encoded by RNA. Thus, the Nano-particulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy.” This truly sheds a bright light of hope on humanity.
What this basically means, is genetically engineered cells. But not just any tweaked immune cells, rather the cancer cell itself. The vaccine shot practically travels the cancer to the body’s immune cells and introduces the enemy, again. Dutch immunologists Jolanda de Vries and Figdor in a commentary accompanying the Nature paper explains it this way, “One reason is that cancer cells are similar in many ways to normal cells and the immune system avoids attacking the self.” When a cancerous tumor grows, the cancer cells manipulates the immune system making them thinking they are part of the body. As a result, the sentry cells fail to recognize these harmful cells as their enemy and lets them grow into tumors.
The vaccine is produced from taking a cancer cell from the host’s (the patient’s) body, then engineered the RNA in such manner that, when it is injected to the body back again, the immune cells cannot be manipulated and recognize any cell similar to that invading cell, as enemy. Hence, they reactivate themselves in killing the cancer cells. Not only that, the researching team believes, vaccinated immune systems will be always alert if it ever develops other kind of cancerous cells also. Saving you from any future risks whatsoever.
Aine McCarthy, the senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, told The Telegraph, “By combining laboratory-based studies with results from an early-phase clinical trial, this research shows that a new type of treatment vaccine could be used to treat patients with melanoma by boosting the effects of their immune systems. Because the vaccine was only tested in three patients,
large clinical trials are needed to confirm it works and is safe, while more research will determine if it could be used to treat other types of cancer.”