Cienciaes.com: Vaccines against cancer.

2021-07-02 17:26:35

This week we deal with a topic that continues to be part of scientific news. Vaccines, in this case against cancer. I will begin by clarifying that, in reality, in this case it is not about preventive vaccines, like the one that is being administered today to a good part of the world, counting the COVID-19, but curative vaccines. Preventive cancer vaccines have not yet been invented, to my knowledge. However, there are very effective preventive procedures, such as not smoking or allowing anyone to smoke around you, not drinking a drop of alcohol in any form, not even wine, beer, or tinto de verano, doing vigorous physical exercise for at least 75 minutes a week, particularly if you are of a certain age, in which exercise is more effective than in youth, paradoxically, to prevent cancer and other degenerative diseases, and to eat a healthy diet, rich in fruits and vegetables. These types of measures, although they do not cure cancer, can help prevent it.

On the other hand, the so-called cancer vaccines do not prevent it, but try to cure it, particularly in those cases in which other types of therapies, such as surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, are not effective or cannot be applied to a patient or a specific type of cancer.
Twenty years ago now he spoke for the first time about the experimental development of one of these antitumor vaccines. Let’s see what it consisted of and whether or not the strategy used to develop it has been successful in the fight against cancer.

“Here is the article”:

What results has this type of vaccine provided? Well, the results obtained in clinical trials with tumor cell fusion vaccines with dendritic cells have not given the results that were sought. This type of antitumor strategy does not seem to be used today except experimentally to treat certain tumors. It is not used as an established and reliable therapy, not as an accepted therapy.

However, the results have not been so negative as to abandon the investigation in this matter. Over the years, publications have appeared describing the generation of this type of vaccine for different types of tumors, including breast and multiple myeloma. Cells fused between dendritic cells and tumor stem cells have also been generated, which survive conventional therapies and are the cause of cancer relapses with increasingly resistant tumors. What can be concluded today from all these investigations is that to make this strategy effective, it is necessary to manipulate the fused cells through different stimulatory treatments that are not yet well defined. The investigation must continue. Fortunately, this is not the only way that science has managed to manipulate the immune system against cancer and other strategies to achieve this, which I have talked about in previous Quilo shows and will probably talk about again in the future, are turning out to be quite promising.

The second type of strategy that I was referring to, in which the molecules that tumors hide from immune cells were synthesized, has to do with the fact that tumor cells use a series of very ingenious and sophisticated mechanisms to escape from detecting the immune system, particularly cytotoxic CD8 T lymphocytes, which kill them. During these two decades, research in this field has resulted in the development of successful antitumor therapies that earned their discoverers the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2018, which we talked about at the time in this and other science programs. .com.

Cancer research continues, with ups and downs, but always in an ascending line. In my opinion, I believe that cancer, any type of cancer, can finally be cured, and I also believe that this cure will happen before the cures for other terrible ills that afflict humanity, such as poverty, injustice, and the lack of proper education, which minimizes intelligence and amplifies stupidity, as we can see every day.

Jorge Laborda (06/30/2021)

Works by Jorge Laborda.

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