Oct 19, 2022 12:13 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 19, 2022 12:23 AM by C C.)
BioNTech founders predict cancer vaccine is only years away
https://www.sciencealert.com/biontech-fo...years-away
INTRO: The husband-and-wife team who co-founded BioNTech, the biotechnology company that partnered with Pfizer to develop an effective messenger-RNA (mRNA) shot against COVID-19, has predicted that a cancer vaccine could be widely available within the next decade.
"Yes, we feel that a cure for cancer, or to changing cancer patients' lives, is in our grasp," said Professor Ozlem Tureci during an interview on BBC's 'Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg'.
The cancer vaccine, which would build upon breakthroughs achieved by the scientists during the development of the COVID-19 shot, may be widely available within just eight years, said Professor Ugur Sahin.
"We believe that this will happen, definitely, before 2030," he told Kuenssberg. The hope is that a vaccine currently in development would train the body to recognize and attack cancers using mRNA technology... (MORE - details)
The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer
https://time.com/6220114/breast-cancer-v...velopment/
EXCERPT: Increasingly, scientists are using vaccines to treat cancer earlier, and they have started to score some victories in training the immune system to attack lung, skin, and kidney cancers to prevent them from emerging again in recovered patients.
Those strategies, however, haven’t worked as well with breast cancer. “A lot of breast tumors do not attract the immune system, so there is very little in the way of an immune response,” says Vonderheide. “That’s where vaccines come in, because they are designed to start an immune response that can then be elaborated.”
Vonderheide and others are looking to use vaccines in their truest function: to optimize the immune response against cancer by training cells to recognize tumors as foreign. Once that happens in breast cancer, Vonderheide says it may be possible to not only prevent recurrences in people who have already had cancer, like Lynch, but to even protect people from developing the cancer in the first place.
A breakthrough like that can’t come soon enough, say breast cancer advocates. “I was diagnosed in 1987, and I wasn’t treated much differently from what is available today, in terms of surgery and chemotherapy,” says Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy organization. “Yes, there is a lot of focus on immunotherapy, and that’s exciting from a research perspective. But it hasn’t really made a difference in women’s lives yet.”
While rates of breast cancer in the U.S. had been holding steady in recent decades, beginning in the 2000s, they started inching upward again by about 0.5% a year. Breast cancer accounts for a third of cancer cases in women and kills 43,000 people annually.
To make an immediate impact on people’s lives, says Visco, “we believe that a vaccine approach is certainly the key in preventing people from getting breast cancer to begin with.”
“The whole idea, just like with an infectious disease vaccine, is to identify what’s foreign in the tumor as much as possible and to craft a vaccine that targets what’s foreign,” says Keith Knutson, an immunologist at Mayo Clinic, who along with his colleagues is testing this type of preventive vaccine. “That’s where we’re going to see the power of the immune response in shrinking or preventing cancer.”
That’s easier said than done, however, and this type of vaccine may be at least a decade or so away... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.sciencealert.com/biontech-fo...years-away
INTRO: The husband-and-wife team who co-founded BioNTech, the biotechnology company that partnered with Pfizer to develop an effective messenger-RNA (mRNA) shot against COVID-19, has predicted that a cancer vaccine could be widely available within the next decade.
"Yes, we feel that a cure for cancer, or to changing cancer patients' lives, is in our grasp," said Professor Ozlem Tureci during an interview on BBC's 'Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg'.
The cancer vaccine, which would build upon breakthroughs achieved by the scientists during the development of the COVID-19 shot, may be widely available within just eight years, said Professor Ugur Sahin.
"We believe that this will happen, definitely, before 2030," he told Kuenssberg. The hope is that a vaccine currently in development would train the body to recognize and attack cancers using mRNA technology... (MORE - details)
The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer
https://time.com/6220114/breast-cancer-v...velopment/
EXCERPT: Increasingly, scientists are using vaccines to treat cancer earlier, and they have started to score some victories in training the immune system to attack lung, skin, and kidney cancers to prevent them from emerging again in recovered patients.
Those strategies, however, haven’t worked as well with breast cancer. “A lot of breast tumors do not attract the immune system, so there is very little in the way of an immune response,” says Vonderheide. “That’s where vaccines come in, because they are designed to start an immune response that can then be elaborated.”
Vonderheide and others are looking to use vaccines in their truest function: to optimize the immune response against cancer by training cells to recognize tumors as foreign. Once that happens in breast cancer, Vonderheide says it may be possible to not only prevent recurrences in people who have already had cancer, like Lynch, but to even protect people from developing the cancer in the first place.
A breakthrough like that can’t come soon enough, say breast cancer advocates. “I was diagnosed in 1987, and I wasn’t treated much differently from what is available today, in terms of surgery and chemotherapy,” says Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy organization. “Yes, there is a lot of focus on immunotherapy, and that’s exciting from a research perspective. But it hasn’t really made a difference in women’s lives yet.”
While rates of breast cancer in the U.S. had been holding steady in recent decades, beginning in the 2000s, they started inching upward again by about 0.5% a year. Breast cancer accounts for a third of cancer cases in women and kills 43,000 people annually.
To make an immediate impact on people’s lives, says Visco, “we believe that a vaccine approach is certainly the key in preventing people from getting breast cancer to begin with.”
“The whole idea, just like with an infectious disease vaccine, is to identify what’s foreign in the tumor as much as possible and to craft a vaccine that targets what’s foreign,” says Keith Knutson, an immunologist at Mayo Clinic, who along with his colleagues is testing this type of preventive vaccine. “That’s where we’re going to see the power of the immune response in shrinking or preventing cancer.”
That’s easier said than done, however, and this type of vaccine may be at least a decade or so away... (MORE - missing details)