Medical researchers have been searching for a cure for cancer for decades, but so far, success has been spotty. Now, however, one country is claiming that its medical scientists are “close” to a vaccine that would prevent the dreaded disease.
On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the surprising announcement at a Moscow forum on future technologies that his country is about to make medical history, Reuters reported.
Putin told his audience that “we have come very close to the creation of so-called cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs of a new generation.”
“I hope that soon they will be effectively used as methods of individual therapy,” he said.
The Russian president did not clarify which types of cancer his vaccines would treat or how they might work.
The idea of a vaccine that would work to prevent cancer is not a new one.
Medical researchers in the United Kingdom are working on clinical trials for”personalised cancer treatments” in cooperation with Germany-based BioNTech. The process, though, is long-term, with a goal of reaching 10,000 patients by 2030, Reuters noted.
Pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck & Co. are working on a cancer vaccine in the United States. Midstage trial data released in December indicated the vaccine might cut the risk of melanoma recurrence by half after three years of treatment, according to CNBC.
There are already vaccines that attack the human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that can lead to cancerous growths of various types, including cervical cancer.
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But researchers are close to effective treatments in many areas.
In 2022, a promising cancer treatment for rectal cancer was put into clinical trials at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
The New York Times reported at the time that the treatment on the test subjects was 100 percent successful and that the cancer had “vanished” in every patient.
Researcher Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. said it was the first time in medical history that such a miraculous result was ever seen.
The drug, Jemperli, reportedly “unmasks cancer cells, allowing the immune system to identify and destroy them,” the Times reported.
Last year, other researchers said they found that DNA therapies could lead to doctors being able to target and eliminate cancer cells.
A study from the University of Tokyo published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society found that a special strand of DNA injected into cancer cells helped unravel the cancerous growth and allowed the cells to be destroyed by an immune response.
“We found that the products from the hairpin DNA assembly selectively kill miR-21-abundant cancer cells in vitro and in vivo based on innate immune activation,” the research paper said.
Some of the early findings in all these cancer efforts are promising. Scientists could, at long last, be on the cusp of some serious breakthroughs in the fight against deadly cancers.
