Cancer vaccine coming soon? It would even be right away, according to certain sites. One of them reads “A vaccine that helps fight cancer”. On another: “Soon a vaccine against cancer”.
These are very recent articles, and we certainly want to believe it. In 2018, there were 382,000 new cases of cancer in mainland France and 157,400 deaths from cancer. It is the leading cause of death in men, and the second in women, after cardiovascular disease.
And in women, the most common cancer is breast cancer, which also gives rise to very promising articles that we will peel. One of them tells us that a vaccine in the clinical trial has treated a patient affected by breast cancer. This corresponds roughly to what the Mayo Clinic, an American research institute, has announced. And this concerns a woman who had very underdeveloped cancer, whose immune response was boosted with what we can indeed call a vaccine.
Why do we say it corresponded “roughly”? Because researchers do not say they treated this woman. At the Mayo Clinic, we talk about “promising results”. And beyond his case, it must be remembered that a person remains a special case and that a scientific study is a very long process.
Yes, there are several phases: in the laboratory, on animals, then on humans, and finally on hundreds of men and women. It takes years, at least a dozen, to conduct a study. All this, before imagining product development and marketing authorizations.
So the articles that tell us about today or tomorrow go a little too quickly. Besides, even the Mayo Clinic and its promising results give no date. We talk about the future and the hope of developing a vaccine… We could read “8 years old”, in a researcher interview given to the Magazine Forbes, it still gives us time to see it coming.
Where is immunotherapy at?
That was for breast cancer, but you told us that some articles talk about vaccines to treat cancer, ALL cancers ! Yes then again, it’s a bit like there are words missing so that this info is the right one. The truth is that INSERM announced it at the end of the year, and it’s abouta “vaccine to lift resistance to immunotherapies”. So it deserves a little decryption.
Immunotherapy is a revolution in the treatment of cancer, which was also awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2018, and it consists in awakening the cells of immunity, so that they fight actively against cancer. It’s very promising but the problem, besides the fact that it doesn’t work on all types of canceris that it only works at best in 1 in 4 patients.
And to return to INSERM’s announcements, researchers from Lyon have shown that vaccines against gastro-virus – already on the market: they exist – could reduce resistance to immunotherapy and therefore make this therapeutic approach relevant for more patients.
What is happening is that the virus in the vaccine will first attack cancer cells, which weakens their immunity. When the researchers injected the vaccine + immunotherapy, the tumor disappeared, even on models that until now were resistant.
Here again, we are in vitro and in vivo, on animal models, so very far from humans… This is why you have to take tweezers and it is not for tomorrow … But this is also how it all starts, and it is very promising. Especially since many teams around the world are working on this much-awaited vaccine.
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