News from the Cancer Battlefield

[brynndragon]

(courtesy of joedecker)

Clinical trials with a vaccine used as a treatment for kidney cancer are having extremely promising results. I wish they'd come up with a better term for this type of treatment. It doesn't prevent cancer, it simply causes the immune system to treat cancerous cells as foreign invaders and eradicate them (it uses the same mechanism, but doesn't have the same effect). Sadly I'm not coming up with something that isn't horribly clumsy, like Anti-Cancer Immune Response Treatment (it's not even a nice acronym ;P).

But this goes beyond semantics. Scientists in Kentucky have created an actual cancer vaccine in mice, a treatment that prevents the development of cancers in mice exposed to carcinogenic agents. Which is really nifty, but the most astonishing thing is how they accomplished this: they injected the mice with embryonic stem cells. The "real" treatment included an immune-system booster which was incredibly effective (90-100% tumor prevention), but even the stem cells alone were sufficient to prevent a majority of tumors. I *really* want to know what the MoA (method of action, i.e. what it's doing to have the effects it has) is for that treatment. . .