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First Cancer Vaccine Produced

Posted by michael on from the cure-for-what-ails-you dept.

notestein writes "Scientists have produced a vaccine that is 100% effective against the virus that causes practically all forms of cervical cancer. In the US Pap smear tests have reduced the 13,000 new cases of cervical cancer each year to only 4,100 deaths. Still, worldwide, 258,000 women died from cervical cancer last year. The same article also mentions that a vaccine that is 75% effective in protecting women against herpes has been tested."

6 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Ten years from now... by Cuchullain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How many more of these sort of discoveries will we have made?

    I just read that the AD-36 virus and related variants have been shown to be a contributing factor in 30% of the obesity in the world. Now I see this article on Cancer.

    Wild. How many of our daily problems are caused by these little rna splicing machines we call viruses?

    Makes you think. I just hope that this is well tested enough for my daughter to use it in 10 or 15 years.

    Cuchullain

    --
    "If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
  2. I don't mean to be sour -- this is great news by MacAndrew · · Score: 5, Informative

    But few cancers are caused by viruses, and most cancers are invisible to your immune system, assuming it is working properly (e.g., not HIV, which does pave the way for Karposi's sarcoma). If the cancers themeselves were detectable, the immune system would destroy the tumor. The HPV vaccine primes the immune system to attack the traces of the virus (unless I'm mistaken).

    As an aside, one of the big mysteries about HIV has been why the immune system doesn't simple kill it. It can do so to a certain extent, but HIV has the sinister strategy of infecting the immune system iteself, hiding out in T-cell. Interesting and evil.

    1. Re:I don't mean to be sour -- this is great news by Incongruity · · Score: 4, Insightful
      But few cancers are caused by viruses

      Funny, I didn't think they'd conclusively figured out the cause of all cancers. (They haven't. They've made leaps forward in general oncology and they've figured out the multi-variate nature of the origins of most cancers.) Therefore, I think that you're being a bit heavy handed in your dismissal/minimization of this discovery. In point of fact, there was a time when people said that cervical cancer wasn't caused by a virus either

    2. Re:I don't mean to be sour -- this is great news by MacAndrew · · Score: 4, Informative

      I didn't think they'd conclusively figured out the cause of all cancers

      All cancers? No. You're right that the viral theory for cervical cancer is fairly new, and I think most of the viral research goes back 20 years or so. But so far only a few cancers are known (retro)viral in origin, and it is abundantly clear cancer also results regularly from radiation (from gamma rays to UV), various chemicals (carconigens), smoking, genetic predisposition, and so on. Even the usually benign HPV does not technically cause cervical cancer, it is risk factor for it. The chances that all or most cancers are viral are small; I think the current estimate is something like 1/6, and don't believe the HPV researchers would suggest this is the holy grail -- outside of women concerned about cervical cancer.

      So "cancer vaccine" sounds like more than it is. It is a vaccine aganst one kind of virus that in some women leads to cancer; someday hopefully soon we will have a vaccine against HIV; but these are far from a treatment for cancer or protection against cancer in general. This is a very significant finding if it pans out, but is also easily overstated. Don't stop donating to the Cancer Society it other words...

  3. Hold your horses... by (trb001) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This isn't a vaccine for cancer, it's a vaccine for the virus that leads to most cases of cervical cancer, HPV. Other cancers, heck even this type of cancer, are not helped by using this vaccine. It's only if you get it before you've contracted the virus, I'm guessing, that it's even effective. This is a long, long way from developing something that can remove/cure cancer 100% effectively.

    --trb

  4. Story Lead and Slashdot blurb both misleading by MarkedMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you read the story, you will see the following:
    "Although there are more than 30 types of HPV that can infect human beings, one of them -- type 16 -- is responsible for about half of all cervical cancers. The experimental vaccine, made by Merck Research Laboratories, protected only against that one, although future formulations are likely to also protect against the less common HPV types that can cause cervical cancer" So although it is very good news, it does not protect against "the" virus that causes cervical cancer, it protects against the variant of that virus that causes 50% of virus derived cervical cancer. No small feat and better things to come, but not what it says in the Article lead.