"When this first came on my radar about a year ago, partly, I was just surprised to be reading kind of frank mentions of cancer vaccines because, you know, growing up we think of vaccines as one of these miraculous interventions in public health that can basically eradicate a disease, right? So it's important to note that, in the cancer context, these are therapeutic vaccines, so it's not about providing immunity on the level of the population."
"Cancer: it's a diagnosis that most of us have learned to fear. On the one hand decades of medical advancements have increased treatment and survival rates. A number of people who in the past might have died from cancer now go on to live long, full lives without recurrence. But not everyone is so lucky. For certain kinds of cancers, including cancer of the pancreas, effective treatments largely remain elusive, so increasingly, researchers are looking to a perhaps unexpected tool for help: vaccines."
mRNA technology, already used to protect against COVID-19, is being adapted to create therapeutic vaccines that stimulate the immune system to target established cancers. Therapeutic vaccines differ from preventive vaccines by aiming to treat individual patients rather than provide population-level immunity. Some cancers have seen improved survival from medical advances, but cancers such as pancreatic cancer still lack effective treatments. Researchers are exploring vaccines as a novel approach to reach tumors that resist conventional therapies, signaling a potential shift in cancer treatment strategies and renewed investment in vaccine-based immunotherapies.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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