Masturbation and its effect

Scientists have performed
the first trials of a 'universal
cancer vaccine'

Scientists just took a big, " very positive " step
towards developing what could be the first
'universal cancer vaccine'.
The results from early trials in humans, along
with research in mice, have just been
published, and they suggest that the new
technique could be used to activate patients'
immune systems against any type of tumour,
no matter where it is in the body.
Unlike the vaccines we're familiar with, this
potential vaccine would be given to patients
who already have cancer, rather than those at
risk of getting it. It basically works by shooting
tiny 'darts' containing pieces of RNA extracted
from the patient's cancer cells at the body's
own immune system, convincing them to
launch an all-out attack on any tumours they
come across.
By just changing the RNA inside those darts,
the team can, in theory, mobilise the immune
system against any kind of cancer. "[Such]
vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce,
and virtually any tumour antigen can be
encoded by RNA," the team, led by researchers
at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in
Germany, reports in Nature.
"Thus, the nanoparticulate RNA immunotherapy
approach introduced here may be regarded as
a universally applicable novel vaccine class for
cancer immunotherapy."
Immunotherapy, which involves using the
patient's own immune system to attack cancer,
isn't in itself new - researchers are already
using it against different cancer types with
great results.
But until now, researchers have mostly done
this by genetically engineering special, cancer-
targeting immune cells in the lab, and then
injecting them back into a patient - which is a
time-consuming and expensive process.
The difference with this technique is that the
vaccine is made in the lab, and it introduces
the cancer DNA into the immune cells within
the body, which is a lot less invasive. It also
means that the vaccine can be tweaked to hunt
a range of cancer types.
So why isn't the immune system naturally
taking out these cancer types?
"One reason is that cancer cells are similar in
many ways to normal cells and the immune
system avoids attacking the self," explain
Dutch immunologists Jolanda de Vries and
Figdor in a commentary accompanying the
Nature paper.
That means that when you develop a vaccine,
you need to use an antigen - a foreign
molecule that works like a 'mugshot' for the
immune system - that's not expressed in
normal cells, too.
"Only relatively modest immune responses
occur with vaccines containing antigens that
are also expressed on healthy tissue," write de
Vries and Carl Figdor. "Strong immune
responses can be expected only when cancer
cells express antigens that are not usually
expressed in normal adult cells."
It's this kind of cancer-specific antigen that
the new vaccine is designed to deliver to the
immune system. It works by coating the
cancer RNA in a simple, fatty acid membrane,
and giving it a slightly negative charge.
This means that once the vaccine is injected
into a patient, it's drawn via electric charge
towards dendritic immune cells in the spleen,
lymph nodes, and bone marrow.
These dendritic cells then 'show' the cancer
RNA to the body's T cells and, to
anthropomorphise the situation, pretty much
tell them, "Hey, this is the guy we're after, go
get him." The goal is that the T cells will then
go out and mass murder all the cancer cells in
the body.
And this is what early research by the German
team has demonstrated in mice. Once injected
with the vaccine, the immune system was able
to fight "aggressively growing" tumours, the
research found.
Of course, many results in mice don't translate
to humans , so we can't get too excited just
yet.
The team has also now trialled a version of the
vaccine in three patients with melanoma. The
point of the trial was only to test whether the
vaccine was safe to use in humans, not
whether it was effective, and so far, the results
are promising. The side effects were limited to
flu-like symptoms, which is better than most
chemotherapy treatments.
The team is now waiting 12 months for follow-
up results from this safety trial, and if all goes
well, will start a larger clinical trial after that to
see if the vaccine really works.
"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," Aine McCarthy, the senior
science information officer at Cancer Research
UK, told The Telegraph.
“Because the vaccine was only tested in three
patients, larger 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."
Although it's still very early days, we have
another reason to feel hopeful about the future
of cancer treatment. And that's always a good
thing.

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