Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-022-00418-6

by CharlesW • 4 years ago

157 128 4 years ago

Buttons8403• 4 years ago

A medicine that sometimes stops a bad thing from happening is hard for people to appreciate, because if it works you'll never know it, and it might have some side effects.

We need to improve public education about why we believe these medicines work. I want to see the studies presented on social media: "We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!" Less censoring people and more presenting the studies in a way people can understand. Less appealing to authority and more appealing to observations; yes, you observed your 2 relatives, and I observed 30,000 people, judge for yourself which is more persuasive.

Most people aren't going to read your 3 paragraph abstract, let alone the the full paper. You have to tell them the observations in a few sentences, preferably with minimal added interpretation.

jostmey• 4 years ago

Cancer vaccines would be given to someone with cancer. These vaccines would not be preventative

bitxbitxbitcoin2• 4 years ago

That there is confusion just emphasizes that the term therapeutic vaccine needs more education around it.

When I think of vaccines, I think of something that’s preventative - regardless of the mechanism. Even the coming “Lyme Disease” vaccine is still preventative though it’s more of a tick bite vaccine.

Someone please school me.

Why is it a therapeutic vaccine - what’s wrong with calling it a treatment?

mig392• 4 years ago

Giving HPV vaccines to teens (including boys) seems to be preventative.

Izkata5• 4 years ago

Then these shouldn't be called vaccines.

ajsnigrutin8• 4 years ago

I want to see the studies presented on social media: "We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!"

We've had two years of that... get vaccinated and you won't get it, also get vaccinated and you won't get your grandparents ill!

Somehow all the censoring was done on people who didn't believe these claims.

bamboozled• 4 years ago

To be fair we also now have stories that some people were injured from the vaccines ?

mig392• 4 years ago

I guess we were hearing different messages?

I thought the vaccine message was "get vaccinated so you won't die when you get it."

Cloudef• 4 years ago

I think the whole ordeal just reminded me how strong grip the mass media has on the general public. Fearmongering is a strong weapon. Peak of covid was some of the most depressing time to me seeing people tear each other apart.

anonporridge• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

the-printer• 4 years ago

"We gave 30,000 people this drug and you won't believe what happened!"

Lab coat Clickbait?

pydry2• 4 years ago

Less appealing to authority and more appealing to observations

Antivaxxers aren't exactly scientifically inclined skeptics who will change their minds if fed more objective, impartial evidence.

They probably can be reached but I'm certain this isnt the way.

dmix5• 4 years ago

Every antivaxxer I know is skeptical because it ties into their existing beliefs of some hidden overarching power-system trying to control them.

Censorship and hiding criticism (informed or not) ‘for the greater good’ is like throwing gasoline on the fire. I have a family member who was merely just a lightweight New Age/holistic type of…skeptic. But the whole COVID response made it way worse. She doesn’t watch videos about why vaccines are bad, 90% of them are how the virus government/billionaires/big tech did x shady thing, so therefore don’t trust the vacinnes.

It’s really easy to spin that sort of thing into “they must have something to hide”.

I highly doubt all of the effort Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc put into silencing dissent really did anything to promote better science or quell the fringes.

I don’t think anyone even cares if it did or not after-the-fact.

90d• 4 years ago

We need to improve public education

more propaganda

No.. we need to improve transparency and actually do the studies?

heavyset_go• 4 years ago

It's been my experience that people do not understand or care about what representative samples are.

cm21872• 4 years ago

And also be transparent about the pros and cons. One of the mistakes with covid is having made all sort of false statements about the efficiency of the vaccines (like it stops infections, the virus would be gone if everyone was vaccinated, kids are at risk of covid and must be vaccinated, etc) while the actual merits of the vaccine (dramatically reduces deaths and hospitalisations) should have been enough to convince the population at risk. Once you lied to people once, it takes a lot of time to re-establish trust.

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

dont need masks

do need masks we lied because we think you’re stupid and would hoard all the masks

now you don't believe we need masks because we said prevent instead of reduce, and nothing was prevented

now you bolstered your opinion because we said “no evidence” instead of “the study hasn't been completed”

yes we said it affects young people and that caused a panic as if it was 1918 all over again, but you have to understand that 50 year olds are young to us and we are always speaking in a health professional context that nobody else knows even during the one time the public needs clear communication

adamredwoods• 4 years ago

> Effective vaccines are likely to be combined with other immunostimulatory approaches including adoptive T cell therapies and to be deployed in postsurgical adjuvant settings to prevent relapses.

Mostly post-surgical, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually used for metastatic as well. Good luck to all involved.

mcbain• 4 years ago

Immunotherapy is also being trialled as a neoadjuvant with promising results.

christkv• 4 years ago

These are therapeutic vaccines customised to each case. My father is heavily involved with this working on one targeting brain cancers.

It's not a silver bullet but it will help if the patient responds and the cancer is not aggressive enough to kill the patient before the immune system is reactivated to fight the cancer successfully.

If it does work it looks very likely there will be no relapse.

wnevets• 4 years ago

I'm curious to know if the anti-vaxxer community continues their crusader once a cancer curing vaccine is wildly available. Seems to me it would be pretty hard for them to stick to their guns while cancer eats away at their insides.

Eleison232• 4 years ago

Cures for cancer aren't allowed. They would hurt the research and grant-receiving community far too much. The FDA would never approve a cancer cure. So don't worry too much about an... acceptable... cure for cancer emerging.

otikik4• 4 years ago

They will because they’re getting old and some of them will get cancer.

refurb7• 4 years ago

Except we already have a number of cures for cancer, so your theory doesn’t check out.

shigawire• 4 years ago

Did you ever hear about the car that runs on water?!

logicchains2• 4 years ago

Seems to me it would be pretty hard for them to stick to their guns while cancer eats away at their insides.

Not if the cancer vaccines are as effective at preventing cancer as the covid vaccines are at preventing people getting covid.

Gatsky• 4 years ago

For instance, numerous monoclonal antibody trials failed to show reproducible efficacy for nearly 20 years before the eventual success of rituximab in 1997 (ref. 7); anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) antibody data lacked clinical efficacy for years before the first nivolumab data were published8; and many years of ineffective chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T cell) clinical data prefaced their eventual success.

This is a bit disingenuous. The mentioned therapies were developed from scratch in those time frames, whereas vaccine technology has been around for over 3 times as long. CART cells are also a much more complex and difficult therapy than vaccines…

amluto• 4 years ago

I hope this technology, if successful, doesn’t get stuck in the land of very expensive, exotic cancer therapies. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is nasty, and if you are over the age of 20 or so you probably have a latent EBV infection. A safe vaccine that could clear an existing EBV infection has the potential to prevent quite a large set of nasty conditions, cancer and otherwise. Think of it as something like the shingles vaccine, but a bigger deal.

It with also be interesting to see if the technologies used could lead to dramatically better vaccines for ordinary acute conditions. There is some evidence that people with pre-existing cellular immunity to intercellular antigens expressed very early in the lifecycle of a Covid-infected cell confers very strong immunity. The current vaccines don’t provide this sort of immunity, but the cancer vaccines are mostly targeting cellular immunity to intracellular antigens.

ackbar03• 4 years ago

A very expensive and exotic treatment is still better than no treatment I guess. At least we have a starting point of knowing that something works, other people can hopefully come along and cut the costs down.

That being said, we still have cost problems even for not-so exotic treatments like bio-similars drugs (the generic equivalent for biologic drugs such as insulin). A lot of these drugs are off patent but still highly difficult and expensive to produce. Solving this bottleneck will be hugely beneficial to a lot of people

freddealmeida• 4 years ago

We are learning more each day but i would never take anything like this. Preventing cancer without understanding the causal/morphological underpinnings seems like stopping kitchen fires by removing all the air in the room. Side effects would/could be significant.

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

Side effects would/could be significant

Got to give it to the internet. Railing against a hypothetical cure for cancer.

lm284692• 4 years ago

It wouldn't be the first health scandal

khnov• 4 years ago

My father has cancer on stage 4, he probably will die soon, do anyone knows if there are treatment he can try ?

JPLeRouzic• 4 years ago

I am very sorry for your father.

There are many different kind of cancers, and metastasis' complexity further complicates the treatment. I guess the best hope is to get a bleeding edge medical treatment by joining a clinical trial, (and hoping to not be in the control arm).

Did you hear about CUSP9:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUSP9

lm284692• 4 years ago

Cancer is already preventable, the vast majority of them are lifestyle/environment related: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/

This is like preventively giving broad spectrum antibiotics to animals raised in super dense cage farms. You wouldn't need most of them if you weren't raising them in hellish conditions, and the long term consequences are dire

Vaslo• 4 years ago

Armamentarium is a the word of the day for me.

Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier

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