A revolutionary jab that could both prevent and treat breast cancer has been developed.
The drug – to be tested on women as early as next year – could wipe out up to 70 per cent of breast cancers, saving more than 8,000 lives a year in the UK alone.
Its creator Dr Vincent Tuohy said the effects could be ‘monumental’.
‘We believe that this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines have prevented many childhood diseases,’ he said.
The theory behind the vaccine could eventually be used to target other types of cancer as well, he added.
The drug targets a protein called alphalactalbumin that lurks in most breast cancer tumours.
Having the jab revs up the immune system, priming it to destroy the protein as it appears and so stop tumours forming.
It also harnesses the power of the immune system to shrink pre-existing growths by up to half.
Dr Tuohy’s team tested the vaccine on rodents that were genetically prone to breast cancer.
This jab can prevent people getting cancer in the first place. This vaccine contains DNA and remains of tumor and they trigger only the specific immune cells that target melanoma. The vaccine is developed by Scancell Company and jab will be given to patients having advance stage of skin cancer and patients having earlier stage of the disease.
Lead researcher Professor Lindy Durrant from Nottingham University explains that this is huge. They could now have a vaccine that can target a tumor and kill it without damage to surrounding healthy cells or tissues. In short term, this could cure some patients with the disease and in long run it could be used to prevent people developing it in first place.
Earlier jabs of cancer did not work because they aroused the whole immune system of the body not just the parts that attacks cancer cells. But this jab could be more effective and will kill cancer cells. The jab could be tailored to fight other tumors. Over production of stem cells of breast could cause most breast cancers probably leads to new treatments, revealed other group of researchers.
Hormones released during the menstruation could cause a gush in the number of breast stem cells which are seeds for breast cancer and are main cause of breast cancer, shows findings published in journal Nature.
This is a very clever vaccine and will increase the cure rate for cancer patients in the future. Thousands of people are diagnosed with malignant melanoma every year, said Professor Karol Sikora, a leading cancer expert.
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“Up until very recently, all patients with breast cancer were basically given the same therapy.
“We now clearly know that’s not the right way to do things.”
Professor Peter Rigby, chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research, believes that recently the way treatments for cancer are being researched has completely changed.
And this, he thinks, is because of great strides made on how scientists are able to understand the genetic code.
In 2003, the Human Genome Project succeeded in sequencing the human genome to 99.9% accuracy, allowing scientists to “read” human DNA. Since then, researchers have been using this so-called roadmap to find a correlation between certain genomes and cancer.
This means that, in theory at least, cancer could be treated on a molecular level rather than using current therapies – such as chemotherapy or surgery – which damage many healthy cells along with those which are cancerous.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/10182421.stm