Part 1:
Injecting flu vaccine directly into the tumors of mice that have lung, breast, and melanoma cancer shrank the primary and metastisized cancers and prolonged life
The new thrusts in cancer research involve immunotherapy, in which the body's own systems kill the cancer versus the old cut/burn/poison treatments.
Tumor immunology started with William Coley, M.D. and his Mixed Bacterial Vaccine in the 1890s, which worked best on sarcomas, but was far less effective on melanomas and carcinomas. Very interesting history at:
https://www.ifaemm.de/Abstract/PDFs/GK12_2.pdf
https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/april-2015/what-ever-happened-to-coleys-toxins
https://www.cancerresearch.org/about-cri/cri-history
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1888599/
Here's the latest research on germs affecting cancer:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-flu-shot-cancer.html
Can the flu shot help fight cancer?
by Rush University Medical Center
January 7, 2020
… Physicians and scientists at Rush University Medical Center have found that injecting tumors with influenza vaccines, including some FDA-approved seasonal flu shots, … could lead to an immunotherapy to treat cancer. …
Drawing on a National Cancer Institute database, researchers found that people who had lung cancer and hospitalization for a lung infection from influenza at the same time lived longer than those who had lung cancer with no influenza. They found a similar outcome in mice with tumors and influenza infection in the lung.
…
To find an alternative to the limitations of live infection, researchers inactivated the influenza virus, essentially creating a flu vaccine.
They found that direct injection of this vaccine into the skin melanoma of the mice resulted in the tumors either growing slower or shrinking. …
Importantly, injecting a skin melanoma tumor on one side of the body not only resulted in the reduced growth of that tumor, but also in reduced growth of a second skin tumor on the other side of the same mouse that was not injected.
The study authors note that they observed similar systemic outcomes in a mouse model of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, in which both primary tumor growth and the natural spread of the breast tumor to the lungs were reduced after injection only into the primary tumor. …
The researchers found that injection of such flu shots also resulted in reduction of tumor growth.
To determine if similar results could be obtained with tumors from patients, the researchers developed a mouse model, which they call AIR-PDX. To create this model, they implant a piece of tumor and immune cells from a patient with cancer into a mouse that does not have a functioning immune system of its own—which prevents the mouse from rejecting the implanted cells. …
The researchers used a patient's lung tumor and a melanoma metastasis in AIR-PDX models. They found that putting the flu shot in these patient-derived tumors causes them to shrink, while untreated tumors continued to grow. …
Since new treatments are often compared to or combined with current frontline therapies for cancer, the researchers used immune checkpoint inhibitors in their studies. Immune checkpoint inhibition "releases the brakes" on immune cells so that they can fight the tumor.
The researchers found that flu vaccines can reduce tumor growth when used alone, whether or not the tumor is responsive to checkpoint inhibitor therapy. When they combined the flu vaccine with a checkpoint inhibitor together, an even a greater reduction in tumor growth occurred. …
[Moar at website]
Journal article: Jenna H. Newman et al, Intratumoral injection of the seasonal flu shot converts immunologically cold tumors to hot and serves as an immunotherapy for cancer, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019).
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904022116
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/26/1904022116
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