Treatment involves injecting the transformed cancer cells to destroy the cancer.
And if soon it is possible to prevent brain cancers With a simple vaccine? That’s the promise of work from Harvard Medical School researchers who’ve developed a particularly innovative treatment. The goal, however, is to inject cancer cells into the patient’s body in order to destroy those that pose a higher risk. The first results are very promising.
modified cancer cells
The results of this unpublished work have been published In the scientific journal Science Translational Medicine. The scientists started from a very simple assumption: modifying cancer cells so that they become “killers” of cancer cells.
When a glioblastoma, brain cancer Most common in adults, the cancer cells that originate migrate to the brain, but they always eventually return to their original site and eventually grow there. The purpose of the cells created by the researchers is to replace these cancer cells to destroy them.
memory of the immune system
do this cancer vaccine It doesn’t stop there, because once injected, the modified cells trigger an immune system response that registers the characteristics of the cells associated with glioblastoma to prevent recurrence.
To prevent the situation from getting worse, the cells modified by the scientists have a “safety” that sends them a self-destruct message to prevent them from reproducing in turn.
The first critical tests
This treatment therefore has two purposes: to treat glioblastoma when it begins to develop, but also to prevent its recurrence. The first results obtained in laboratory mice with brain cancer are very promising, but it will take a long time for this stage of testing to be transferred to humans. But if the results are confirmed, the door would be open to treating other types of cancer.
