Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine claim that they are on the verge of finding a vaccine that kills all tumors in the body.
The main author of this study, which was published on January 31 in the magazine "Science Translational Medicine", is oncology professor Ronald Levi. He is a pioneer in the field of cancer immunotherapy, and his laboratory developed the common chemotherapy rituximab.
The vaccine they developed is a combination of two existing drugs. It represents a unique type of immunotherapy because it reactivates specific T cells by injecting microgram amounts of two agents directly into the tumor.
"Advances in immunotherapy are changing medical practice. This vaccine showed incredible effects in mice and removed all tumors," Levi said.
As many as 90 percent of the tested mice were cured after one vaccine, while the remaining 10 percent were cured after the second vaccine. Levi's team claims that the vaccine also worked in mice where the cancer had metastasized throughout the body.
He added that the new vaccine does not cause harmful side effects in patients that often occur with other types of immune simulations, and that this vaccine will be more financially profitable than previous treatments.
He intends to include 15 patients with lymphoma in the initial stage in the clinical trial. If the trial is successful, Levi claims that it will be able to be used in more types of tumors and that in time, oncologists will give injections to patients before surgery to prevent the recurrence of tumors.
"I think that with this vaccine in the future we will be able to treat all types of tumors," Levi said, reports klix.ba.
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