Could This Vaccine Help Fight Cancer?
Could This Vaccine Help Fight Cancer? Researchers who have harnessed the body’s immune system to fight cancer have found a way to make the approach work even better, using an ordinary tetanus vaccine.
They used their double-vaccine approach to greatly lengthen the lives of patients with one of the deadliest types of cancer — the brain tumor glioblastoma. They remove some of the patient’s own immune cells, train them to recognize the tumor, and then re-inject them. It’s a hit-and-miss approach being used against a range of cancers.
Dr. John Sampson of Duke University Medical Center, who oversaw the study said, “Patients with glioblastoma usually survive for little more than one year. However, in patients who received the immunotherapy, half lived nearly five years or longer from their diagnosis.”
The effects were remarkable. Patients who got the tetanus booster lived more than two years on average — about 26 months.
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