9NEWS Health expert Dr. Payal Kohli has more on the study’s findings.
Early research has found COVID vaccines may be helping cancer patients. The study published in the journal Nature found it may be revving up immune systems for patients with advanced lung or skin cancer. Nine News medical expert Doctor Pyle Coley joins us now to talk about the study and what it found. So talk to us about the study and what did they find? What surprised you? Yeah, hot off the presses. It was just presented in Berlin at the oncology meeting. It was surprising because what it found is looked at 1000 cancer patients at MD Anderson, advanced lung and skin cancer, and then it compared those that got the Pfizer or Moderna COVID vaccines versus those that didn’t, and the ones that did had nearly a doubling in their median survival when it came to lung cancer and for melanoma they couldn’t even count because they ended the study and patients were still alive. So really, really surprising findings that it made cancer patients live a lot longer with metastat. Disease. I mean, these COVID vaccines have gotten just like so much bad press. Nobody wants to take them. Why is this possible? How can these vaccines help cancer patients? Yep, so the vaccines are designed to target the virus, but it has nothing to do with the virus. It actually has to do with the immune system. So if you think about how we fight cancer, obviously we use chemotherapy to poison the cancer cells, but one of the other ways we do it is to use our immune system to recognize and attack the cancer cells. Now the cancer cells are smart. Than our immune system, they put on a cloak so they become invisible to our immune system. So that’s where these medications called immune checkpoint inhibitors try to take off that cloak. But some of the cancer cells have now outsmarted those medications even so they don’t know how to take off the cloak. So these COVID messenger RNA vaccines actually get into the cell, take off the cloak from inside, put a little flag on the cell, and say I’m cancer, and they turn up the volume on the immune system. So now the immune system not only is it stronger, it actually. which the cancer cells are and fights them a lot better. That is miraculous. That is unbelievable. That is, that’s great to hear. Now let me ask you if timing has anything to do with it, like when they administer these vaccinations. So in the study they looked at about 100 days, uh, you know, from the time they got immune checkpoint inhibitors to the time they got the vaccines that had to overlap by 100 days, but now they’re looking at studies at 30 days and it works even better at 30 days. So really what this has done is kicked off essentially us looking. Yeah whether we’ve got it all wrong, patients that are getting immunotherapy where you’re using the immune system to attack the cancer should routinely be getting messenger RNA vaccines in order to help fight the cancer better. Now for the longest time scientists have been saying we have to design a specific messenger RNA vaccine specific to your cancer. Now you can imagine that’s expensive, that’s complicated because you have to harvest the cancer cell, then you have to design the vaccine against the cancer cell. But now we’ve got these off the shelf COVID. MesoRA vaccines approved for many years now which we could just use to turn on the immune system and really start to target these patients with advanced cancer. So it begs the question of whether we should start giving this now in more types of cancer, breast cancer, solid cancers. Obviously melanoma, it’s got good data in stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, many of the cancers where we don’t have great chemotherapy and the chemotherapy is very toxic and really can cause a lot of side effects. We don’t have a lot of time left, but I think we have to mention that HHSX. RFK Junior is telling people essentially, you know, not to take the MRNA vaccines. What would you say to folks? I would say this is science at its best and turning our back on this kind of science is really a big shame. Now the vaccines have been around for several years, so that should reassure us. We know that you can get cardiac inflammation. I see that as a cardiologist or inflammation around the heart, but the chances are 10 to 40 cases out of a million, right? And, and you’re talking about several hundreds and thousands of cases of severe COVID infections. So if COVID itself wasn’t enough, keeping you out of the hospital with a 90% chance, preventing long COVID, public health, doing it for vulnerable people. If you have cancer or you have a loved one who has cancer, do it for that person. Doctor Kyle Coley, thank you. I hope people are listening to what you’re saying right now. That is so huge. Uh, you can find more with Doctor Coley at nineews.com/doctor Coley.
