Medical expert explains how the COVID vaccine is helping cancer patients’ immune systems fight cancer cells.
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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 Dr. Pyle Coley joins us now. 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. Cancer patients live a lot longer with metastatic disease. 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 smarter 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 knows which the cancer cells are and fights them a lot better. So really what this has done is kicked off essentially us looking at 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 mesoRNA 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.
