In its efforts to tackle the high incidence of cancers and reduce unwarranted deaths, scientists are on the verge of dicovering a universal vaccine against cancers. According to findings published in the journal ‘Nature’, the vaccine could ensure that the body’s immune system attack tumours as if they were a virus. In the study, the international team of researchers took pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles of fat and then injected the mixture into the bloodstreams of three patients in the advanced stages of the disease.
“The patients’ immune systems responded by producing “killer” T-cells designed to attack cancer,” according to a report in The Independent. Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. Over 100 cancers affect humans beings.
Presently in Nigeria, cancer incidences are common. No week passes that one does not hear that a Nigerian has died of cancer. It is estimated that 100,000 new cancer cases are reported in Nigeria annually, majority of which present very late and this result in high incidence of cancer deaths.
This development makes the new vaccine that scientists are working to produce, very relevant. Apart from producing killer cells that attack cancers, the new vaccine was also found to be effective in fighting “aggressively growing” tumours in mice, according to researchers, who were led by Professor Ugur Sahin from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.
According to the researchers, vaccines were fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumour antigen [a protein attacked by the immune system] can be encoded by RNA,” they noted “Thus, the nanoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy.”
