COVID was a cataclysmic force that disrupted our lives, killed millions, and contributed to students today not knowing how to read. But, on the bright side, it expedited our implementation of mRNA vaccines, which, despite what the current administration says, are as close to a miracle as science can develop.
Case in point: not only did they help us quickly and safely get a COVID vaccine to market, but they might one day teach our immune systems to fight cancer.
A new study published in Nature, led by University of Florida pediatric oncologist Elias Sayour, suggests that the same mRNA vaccines that helped us survive the pandemic might also help people survive cancer. This isn’t a different shot designed for cancer. The same ones you should be getting annually to protect you from COVID might fend off cancer, as a little bonus.
Two of the researchers who worked alongside Seymour, Adam Grippin and Cristiano Marconi, wrote about their findings in The Conversation. They say the team didn’t start with COVID. Back in 2016, while developing mRNA vaccines for brain tumors, they noticed that when the mRNA wasn’t designed to fight cancer, it still seemed to wake up the immune system, making it better at killing tumors.
Then the pandemic hit, and the researchers wondered: if mRNA vaccines could teach the body to hunt down a virus, could the vaccine’s guns be trained on cancer?
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Could Help Fight Cancer, Too
To test the theory, they studied over a thousand late-stage melanoma and lung cancer patients who were receiving immunotherapy, specifically, drugs called “immune checkpoint inhibitors” that train the immune system to keep on fighting cancer.
The results were wild. Patients who got an mRNA COVID shot within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive three years later than those who didn’t. Even people with “cold” tumors, the kind that usually go undetected, saw nearly fivefold improvements in survival.
Animal studies helped explain why: the COVID vaccine acts like an alarm bell, jolting the immune system awake and making it harder for tumors to hide. Combined with checkpoint inhibitors, it’s like switching your immune system from simply “on” to “exterminate with extreme prejudice.”
If this holds up in upcoming clinical trials, it could transform cancer care. Personalized cancer vaccines do exist, though they are complicated and wildly expensive since they have to be tailor-made for each patient. Covid mRNA vaccines, conversely, are inexpensive and widely available at your local CVS.
That jab conspiracy theorists have convinced millions to fear? It might not only help you fight COVID, but also help you fight cancer.
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