Scientists have taken a "very positive step" towards creating a universal vaccine against cancer that makes the body's immune system attack tumours as if they were a virus, experts have said.

    Writing in the British interdisciplinary scientific journal (Nature), an international team of researchers described how they had taken pieces of cancer's genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles of fat and then injected the mixture into the bloodstreams of three patients in the advanced stages of the disease.

    The patients' immune systems responded by producing "killer" T-cells designed to attack cancer. The vaccine was also found to be effective in fighting "aggressively growing" tumours in mice, according to researchers, who were led by Professor Ugur Sahin from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. 

    "Such vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumour antigen [a protein attacked by the immune system] can be encoded by RNA," they wrote. "Thus, the nanoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy."

Source : QNA