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mRNA vaccines are best known for their role during the Covid-19 pandemic, but hey have actually been researched for much longer than that. This method of creating vaccines has been known to have a lot of potential for a wide-range of different health issues, including cancers.
Researchers at the University of Florida were working on an mRNA drug that they hoped would help the body to have an antitumor response when combined with other popular cancer treatments. What they found, however, was that this mRNA treatment worked in surprising ways that are much more promising than even they had hoped. They took their findings and published them in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Senior author of the paper, Elias Sayour, MD, PhD said in a statement:
“This paper describes a very unexpected and exciting observation: that even a vaccine not specific to any particular tumor or virus – so long as it is an mRNA vaccine – could lead to tumor-specific effects.”
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In the past, researchers working on cancer vaccines really had two main options. The first option was to create a vaccine that would target specific proteins that were known to exist at elevated levels in a given type of cancer. By targeting these proteins, the vaccine could make it difficult for the cancer to grow or even survive in the body. The other option, which also used mRNA technologies, created treatments that were customized for each patient. With this option, a doctor could have custom medication that was tailored to the specific DNA of a patient, allowing them to treat even aggressive cancers successfully, or so is the hope.
While those two methods are certainly very valid and will undoubtedly be pursued further, this new study shines light on a new third option. This option works with other cancer treatment methods to treat cancers indiscriminately. No matter what type of cancer a person has, this vaccine would help the body to fight it off. Whether used alone or to give other treatments added success, this is certainly a promising line of research.
In the statement, co-author Duane Mitchell, MD, PhD, said:
“What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction. And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients – even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine.”
So far, the experiments that were performed were done on mice that had been given tumor cells of various types including bone cancer, brain cancer, and melanoma. From there, they were given the mRNA vaccines designed to produce a strong antitumor immune response.
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When this vaccine option was used in conjunction with a PD-1 inhibitor (which is another anti-cancer treatment), the results were more positive than when the mice were treated with the PD-1 on its own.
Of course, this study is just one step in making sure that this type of treatment is safe and effective. Additional research will undoubtedly be needed, but the results it has shown so far are very promising, and the fact that it seems to be effective across cancer types is exciting.
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