Pancreatic cancer is bad news; patients who have it are difficult to treat or cure. The American Cancer Society puts the 5-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer atNow, a new strategy formulated by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has made pancreatic tumours detectable by the immune systems of mice and exposed to immune attack, reducing cancer metastases by 87 percent.
“The problem is that pancreatic tumours aren’t sufficiently ‘foreign’ to attract the immune system’s attention and can usually suppress whatever immune responses do occur. Essentially, our new therapy makes immunologically ‘cold’ tumours hot enough for the immune system to attack and destroy them.”monocytogenes to deliver highly immunogenic tetanus toxoid proteins directly into tumour cells.
How did they do it? The scientists vaccinated mice with the same tetanus vaccine given to people. Then they injected the mice with Listeria bacteria enhanced with tetanus.bacteria are quite weak and are readily killed off by the immune systems of people and animals—everywhere, that is, except in tumour areas,” Gravekamp said.