In the past, doctors have used methods such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation to fight that dreaded disease called cancer. Now, after 30 years, doctors have come up with a fourth way to battle cancer by using something completely natural, the immune system.
This new approach is called a cancer vaccine, even though it treats the disease instead of preventing it. Researchers have recently claimed that this vaccine prevented a common form of lymphoma from getting worse for more than a year. Progress is usually very slow and success with new treatments can be measured in many long days or even weeks, so this is big news in this field of research.
Experimental vaccines developed to fight against prostate, melanoma and neuroblastoma, which is a childhood tumor that is frequently fatal, produced positive results in late-stage testing. These results came in recent weeks, after many years of struggling in the lab.
Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, of the American Cancer Society, said he isn’t sure what they did to make the breakthrough. Dr. John Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute, said that it was not one single moment, but many discoveries concerning the immune system that are finally beginning to show benefits.
This said, no one knows just exactly how long these benefits will last, whether boosters will be needed or if vaccines will one day provide a cure. Numerous vaccines must be custom-made for each patient, so the questions are just how practical and costly will these vaccines be? There are no sure answers yet, although there were several studies on vaccines that were reported during the weekend of June 1 at the oncology group’s annual meeting in Florida.
Dr. Patrick Hwu, melanoma chief at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said that one of the main problems has been getting the immune system to “see” cancer as a threat. Some viruses such as the flu or polio are easy for the immune system to recognize because they look so different from regular human cells.
To help tell the difference between normal cells and cancer cells, numerous cancer vaccines pull a substance from the surface of a cancer cell and adhere it to something that the immune system sees as foreign, such as a shellfish protein in the lymphoma vaccine.
To ensure that the assault is as powerful as possible, doctors attach a substance to cause the immune system to be on an elevated alert.
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