Cancer, wherever it occurs, poses a serious threat to life. Until now, conventional treatment has primarily been chemotherapy and radiation, which have harmful side effects. However, scientists are now exploring a revolutionary way to ‘train’ the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. This brilliant idea is the basis of the mRNA cancer vaccine, which uses the same technology as the COVID-19 vaccine.
How will this new cancer vaccine work?
Professor Yuan Wan of Binghamton University and his team have been researching this technique for several years. They believe that if the body’s immune system is properly identified as a tumor, it can be primed to destroy cancer cells. Just as the COVID-19 vaccine activates the immune system by exposing the body to the virus’s spike protein.
Similarly, mRNA cancer vaccines force cancer cells to produce a specific protein (the spike protein) on their surface that resembles a virus. As soon as this protein is detected on a cancer cell, the body’s immune system immediately goes on alert, treating those cancer cells as an enemy (foreign invader) and rapidly destroying them.
Technology will also deal with the changing form of tumors
A major challenge with cancer is that tumors constantly mutate. This mutation has rendered older treatments or vaccines ineffective against new variants, but new mRNA technology solves this problem. It forces tumors to always display the same unique spike protein on their surface, regardless of how much the rest of their structure changes. This allows the immune system to recognize them and continue to attack.