According to a new report, scientists taken a momentous step towards increasing treatment options for cancer. A breakthrough “universal vaccine” is currently underway — one that causes the body’s immune system to attack cancerous tumors.
Researchers have taken bits of cancer’s RNA code mixed with nanoparticles of fat, then injected it into three patients. To their surprise, each immune system produced “killer” T-cells that attacked the patient’s cancer. All three patients had late stages of the disease.
One of the patient’s tumors became smaller after the vaccine was administered. Another patient, who had the tumors surgically removed, was cancer-free for seven months after receiving the vaccination.
Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, wrote the following in one of their papers:
Such] vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumor antigen [a protein attacked by the immune system] can be encoded by RNA. Thus, the nanoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy.
Unlike chemotherapy, which has extreme side effects, the vaccine is said to only produce flu-like symptoms. This is proving to be exciting for scientists who have been struggling for decades to find an effective cure for the rampant disease.
Nonetheless, there is still much research to be done, and the final product is far from being delivered. Dr. Helen Rippon, chief executive of Worldwide Cancer Research, remarked on the results. “More research is needed in a larger number of people with different cancer types and over longer periods of time before we could say we have discovered a ‘universal cancer vaccine,’” she said. “But this research is a very positive step forwards towards this global goal.”
“We know the immune system has great potential to be manipulated and reactivated to fight cancer cells, that’s why we’ve been funding research into this for 15 years,” Rippon said.
According to a new report, taken a momentous step towards increasing treatment options for cancer. A breakthrough “universal vaccine” is currently underway — one that causes the body’s immune system to attack cancerous tumors.
Source: Western Journalism
