https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/cancer-vaccine-being-tested-in-dogs/ar-AADeGZS?li=BBnb4R7
If you ask most experts in the cancer community, creating a wide-ranging vaccine that prevents tumors like we prevent infectious diseases is damn near impossible.
The idea may be tantalizing, but study after study over the last several decades has taught doctors that cancer is personal. Everyone's looks different on a molecular level. And each tumor is an agile, devious adversary that mutates as it grows to outwit the human immune system.
"They may be right," Stephen Johnston says, but "if the chance is 10% that it might work, I can't see any reason why we shouldn't take that chance."
Johnston isn't an oncologist. He's a scientist, inventor and director of Arizona State University's Center for Innovations in Medicine. He recently launched a clinical trial to test a cancer vaccine in hundreds of dogs across the country. The trial will examine whether the vaccine delays or prevents a variety of cancers in healthy, older dogs. If it's successful, Johnston says, it could lay the groundwork for developing a similar vaccine for humans.
If you ask most experts in the cancer community, creating a wide-ranging vaccine that prevents tumors like we prevent infectious diseases is damn near impossible.
The idea may be tantalizing, but study after study over the last several decades has taught doctors that cancer is personal. Everyone's looks different on a molecular level. And each tumor is an agile, devious adversary that mutates as it grows to outwit the human immune system.
"They may be right," Stephen Johnston says, but "if the chance is 10% that it might work, I can't see any reason why we shouldn't take that chance."
Johnston isn't an oncologist. He's a scientist, inventor and director of Arizona State University's Center for Innovations in Medicine. He recently launched a clinical trial to test a cancer vaccine in hundreds of dogs across the country. The trial will examine whether the vaccine delays or prevents a variety of cancers in healthy, older dogs. If it's successful, Johnston says, it could lay the groundwork for developing a similar vaccine for humans.
