The number of people recovered from cancer, also thanks to the increasingly easier access to healthcare and to research that has experimented with new and more effective treatments. Mortality from cancer, in fact, is decreased over the yearsincreasing the life expectancy of people affected by this pathology.
However, there are still tumors for which it is not easy to cure. The most difficult carcinomas to cure are in fact those affecting vital organs, such as the brain, liver and pancreas. The latter is the deadliest and, according to the Umberto Veronesi Foundation, three quarters of the sick die within one year after diagnosis and 5 years after the discovery of the disease they are alive only 8 out of a hundred patients. However, the discovery of a new cure has sparked humanity’s hopes.
Tried a vaccine against pancreatic cancer
A promising discovery comes from America, which could open new paths in the fight against pancreatic cancer. Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York they studied 16 patients who had surgery to remove ductal cancer, the most common form of pancreatic cancer, e they extracted samples of diseased cells.
These samples were sent to German laboratories of BioNTech, the biotech company that made mRNA vaccines against covid together with Pfizer. Scientists have analyzed the genetic characteristics of proteins found on the surface of tumors and they created mRNA vaccines customized to teach each patient’s immune cells to fight cancer.
The mRNA delivered the instructions to make the same proteins found on diseased cells and stimulate the immune system to recognize them as foreign and eliminate themwith a mechanism similar to the one used to fight SARS-CoV-2.
This discovery has sparked the hope of combating pancreatic cancer at its root, although, however, further studies need to be carried out on a larger number of patients in order to evaluate thelong-term efficacy of the vaccine and its safety. However, the results obtained so far are encouraging, because in 8 of the 16 patients there was a high activation of T cells, which ha prevented tumor progression 18 months after surgery.
This is especially important because ductal adenocarcinoma was hitherto thought to have few specific proteins to be used as targets in personalized vaccines, and did not respond well to immunotherapies. The only sore point is unfortunately the cost of this drug, which could create inequality in access to care.
The cost of the custom vaccine developed in just 9 weeks (6 for the package) is very high, arriving at nearly $100,000 a dosethis could remove the opportunity that a person who is not economically well-off could have a high life expectancy.