Science

erronis

(21,715 posts) Sat Oct 25, 2025, 03:51 PM Yesterday

COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could unlock the next revolution in cancer treatment

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-10-covid-mrna-vaccines-revolution-cancer.html
by Adam Grippin, Christiano Marconi, The Conversation

Of course, brain-worm rfkjr and brain-dead trump are against anything to help fight diseases. rfkjr really doesn't like mRNA (except for his own family, etc.)

The COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines that saved 2.5 million lives globally during the pandemic could help spark the immune system to fight cancer. This is the surprising takeaway of a new study that we and our colleagues published in the journal Nature.

While developing mRNA vaccines for patients with brain tumors in 2016, our team, led by pediatric oncologist Elias Sayour, discovered that mRNA can train immune systems to kill tumors—even if the mRNA is not related to cancer.

Based on this finding, we hypothesized that mRNA vaccines designed to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 might also have antitumor effects.

So we looked at clinical outcomes for more than 1,000 late-stage melanoma and lung cancer patients treated with a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This treatment is a common approach doctors use to train the immune system to kill cancer. It does this by blocking a protein that tumor cells make to turn off immune cells, enabling the immune system to continue killing cancer.

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