Cancer Vaccine now for Clinical Trials by Mexican Researchers

The future of cancer is getting brighter as researchers worked on developing a vaccine for the said disease. At the time, they are making progress as they begin clinical trials for cancer vaccines.

Latin Times reported that Dr. Juan Pablo Marquez Manriquez and his team of researchers at the International Cancer Center in Sonora has begun clinical trials of "a number of vaccines mixed together" which can potentially prevent the recurrence of different types of cancer.

The new therapy works by "training the immune system to recognize and eliminate remaining cancerous cells" after the patient has undergone conventional treatment, Manriquez explained. This vaccine was initially tested on mice.

"The animals that received the vaccine, both individual vaccines and the cocktail, never developed colon, pancreatic or ovarian cancer," said Manriquez. In 2006, the researchers tested the vaccine on 104 patients, which includes 25 patients with colon cancer, 25 with breast cancer, 25 with ovarian cancer, 25 with multiple myeloma and four with pancreatic cancer. "So far, only one of the participants has died and that was due to an unrelated cardiac problem in 2014," he explained.

Due to the desirable results, the researchers are allowed to combine the first phases of the clinical trials and further their testing by reaching out to thousands of patients. Tests will be conducted in Mexico, Sonora, Ciudad Obregon and Tijuana, in collaboration with the National Oncology Institute, which Manriquez referred as the top cancer institution in Mexico and Latin America.

So, how does a cancer vaccine works in one's body? Per Cancer.Net, cancer vaccines boost the immune system's natural ability to recognize and destroy the substances that are foreign and potentially harmful to the body. If one's immune system is healthy, it can easily identify antigens, the foreign substances of the body, attack them and eliminate them in the process. The immune system has a memory which helps it respond when it encounter the same antigen in the future.

A cancer treatment vaccine takes advantage of the immune system's response to antigens. A cancer cell has specific molecules on their surface that are not present in healthy cells. When the vaccine is injected into a person, this specific molecule acts as an antigen and stimulates the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells that contain this molecule on their surface. Cancer vaccines also contain adjuvants, a substance that may help strengthen the immune response.

The researchers predict that if the clinical trial works well, it will be approved in Mexico and the U.S. by 2017 or 2019 the latest. "We will have fewer recurrences, fewer hospitals full of patients with recurrent cancer," he said. "That is what matters, that there will be less pain."