How about a Good Side Effect

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1009 How about a Good Side Effect

Welcome to Medical Discovery News.  I’m. Dr. David Niesel.

And I’m Dr. Norbert Herzog.

A covid vaccine will alleviate your symptoms if you get the virus, but scientists found a surprising new benefit that’s life changing. 

In people with skin and lung cancer, the vaccine upped their survival times when paired with a cancer treatment that doesn’t work as well alone.  

The cancer treatment is a class of drugs called ICI - immune checkpoint inhibitors, which block a protein on cancer cells so that immune cells can recognize them and attack. But it works in less than half of patients. 

To fix this, researchers began making vaccines unique to each patient by using the person’s antigens to activate the immune system, allowing ICI drugs to work better. But this is expensive. 

So, scientists began to wonder if a general immune boost from mRNA vaccines was enough to power the ICI treatment. They looked at one thousand patients with non-small cell lung cancer and metastatic melanoma all being treated with ICIs. A subset had gotten the COVID vaccine within three months of their treatment.    

The lung cancer patients in this subset saw their three-year survival rate jump from thirty to fifty five percent. Similar results were seen in the melanoma patients. 

It seems that mRNA vaccines alerted the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells.  This means doctors can use a low-cost vaccine to improve cancer therapies. 

It’s a profound discovery and yet five hundred million dollars in mRNA vaccine research was discontinued.  We hope other countries believe enough in this work to fund it.  

We are Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog, at UTMB and Quinnipiac University, where biomedical discoveries shape the future of medicine.   For much more and our disclaimer go to medicaldiscoverynews.com or subscribe to our podcast.