Current Events > Boston scientists create vaccine that prevents brain cancer in mice.

(+) Yeah! (+)

In Boston, a potentially-revolutionary treatment for deadly brain cancer is showing promising early signs in mice both for the eradication and prevention of tumors and individual cancer cells.

A vaccine in the true sense of the word, the method involves repurposing living cancer cells to destroy the tumors which spawned them.

Cancer cells have very particular characteristics, one of which potentially makes them even better cancer-killers than immune molecules. That characteristic is their ability to travel long distances through the body returning to the tumor they came from.

By using a similar technique to CRISPR called CRISP-CAS9, researchers at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston were able to change proteins within the living cancer cells to prime tumors and other cells for destruction. The priming got the immune system involved, which then resulted in the mice in immunological memory just like vaccines for viruses.
In experiments, it worked on mice carrying cells derived from humans, mimicking what will happen in patients, which had the deadliest form of brain cancer called glioblastoma.

Our team has pursued a simple idea: to take cancer cells and transform them into cancer killers and vaccines, said corresponding author Dr Khalid Shah.

Using gene engineering, we are repurposing cancer cells to develop a therapeutic that kills tumor cells and stimulates the immune system to both destroy primary tumors and prevent cancer.

Glioblastomas have one of the lowest survival rates of any cancers, with fewer than 10% of patients living past 3 years.

CRISPR has almost the ultimate potential to eliminate cancer through gene-editing, but targeting exactly which genes to edit in cancerous or non-cancerous cells is a matter of serious research.

Throughout all of the work we do, even when it is highly technical, we never lose sight of the patient, said Dr. Shah. Our goal is to take an innovative but translatable approach so that we can develop a therapeutic, cancer-killing vaccine that ultimately will have a lasting impact in medicine.

Full Article: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/vaccine-that-could-cure-and-even-prevent-brain-cancer-developed-by-scientists/

https://i.imgur.com/kNmnqlJ.jpg

Man imagine how much of a fool you would have been to oppose vaccines.

Interesting. I wish them success.

Tag

How's their wifi connection?

Finally. Mice won't have to worry about this cancer anymore.

foreverzero212 posted...

Finally. Mice won't have to worry about this cancer anymore.

I find myself more confident that I'm answering important questions about how the brain works while working with mice than I ever did while working with humans.

Good to remain skeptical about direct translation, but that's not always the goal. Just having information about how these systems generally work provides a gigantic leap forward for producing effective medicine.

COVxy posted...

I find myself more confident that I'm answering important questions about how the brain works while working with mice than I ever did while working with humans.

Good to remain skeptical about direct translation, but that's not always the goal. Just having information about how these systems generally work provides a gigantic leap forward for producing effective medicine.

I get that and don't mean to crap on what we can learn from these models.

It's more of I'm exhausted by seeing articles like this for decades, alleged breakthrough treatments never to be heard from again, not even a follow up if they were even tried on humans, as the same old treatment protocols that have no success continue to be the gold standard for generations.

foreverzero212 posted...

I get that and don't mean to crap on what we can learn from these models.

It's more of I'm exhausted by seeing articles like this for decades, alleged breakthrough treatments never to be heard from again, not even a follow up if they were even tried on humans, as the same old treatment protocols that have no success continue to be the gold standard for generations.

I understand that's how it can seem from the outside. The reality is though that these things often have answers that are more complicated than the initial question. So, while basic science remains underfunded, and the funding and job market tend to push people in inefficient directions, these things just take a long time.

Also, science often sounds simple from a high level persepective, but in practice the amount of work it takes to just get a simple experiment working can span years. The lab I work in spent several years just getting viral expression of certain proteins working in vivo, which is pretty required for all our experiments. We're still working on it, continuously, to keep up with technology. But from a high level "we're going inject this AAV in the brain, wait two weeks, and then image from the infected cells" sounds very easy.