“In a small trial, nearly half of pancreatic cancer patients who received an mRNA vaccine had no signs of relapse after three years,” reports Science Friday:
Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to treat, and about 90% of diagnosed patients die from the disease. A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering has been working to improve those outcomes by developing a new mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer.
A few years ago, the team embarked on a small trial to test the vaccine’s safety. Sixteen patients with pancreatic cancer received it, and even though it was a small study, the results were promising: Half the participants had an immune response, and in those patients the cancer hadn’t relapsed after 18 months.
This week, the team released a new study in Nature following those same patients, and found six out of eight who responded to the vaccine in the first study did not have their cancer return more than three years later.
Moderna is developing a cancer vaccine that is expected to dramatically cut cancer survivors’ risk of death or recurrence. It is also an mRNA vaccine.
A new lung-cancer drug radically increases survival rates. New personalized cancer vaccines cut death rates by 40-50% for some people suffering from skin or breast cancer.
A new blood test can detect which bowel cancer patients can receive a lifesaving immunotherapy rather than chemotherapy, enabling them to be cancer free after surgery. Around 10-15% of patients with stage two or three bowel cancer have a particular genetic make-up that enables them to benefit from the life-saving immunotherapy known as pembrolizumab.
Earlier, a blood test was developed that detects many brain cancers that doctors previously couldn’t detect until it is too late to save most victims.
A new ultrasound therapy could help treat cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
Scientists have created tiny robots to repair damaged cells, and nanorobots to destroy cancerous tumors.
A cancer-fighting substance was found in bird poop by a middle-school student.
The vaccine for pancreatic cancer has not been approved by the FDA yet. Many people die waiting for the FDA to approve life-saving drugs and tests. For example, at least a hundred thousand people died waiting years for the FDA to approve beta blockers. One of the FDA officials involved in delaying their approval was John Nestor. Nestor was notorious for following rules in ways designed to deliberately delay other people, such as his habit of deliberately driving slowly in the fast lane on highways in order to slow down other motorists.
The FDA didn’t approve a home test for HIV until 24 years after it first received an application. According to an FDA advisory committee, the test held “the potential to prevent the transmission of more than 4,000 new HIV infections in its first year of use alone.” That means thousands of people likely got infected with AIDS as a result of the delay in approving it. As Roger Parloff noted in Fortune, the FDA’s delay in approving the home HIV test was a “scandal.” It caused the deaths of thousands of people.
