• frezik@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    There are some promising efforts for vaccines against cancer. It’s teaching your immune system to kill cells that were supposed to die on their own. It’s a relatively recent development, though.

    Plus, as should always be stated with cancer treatments, there is no singular “cancer”. It’s a class of related problems that need to be handled individually. Vaccine against prostate cancer shouldn’t be expected to work against breast cancer. Anything that claims to cure cancer in a blanket way should be treated with great suspicion.

    • legion02@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      The mrna vaccines that allowed us to quickly target covid were under development for targeting cancers. We all got super lucky to be honest.

      • VeryAmaze
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Iirc a version of a COVID vaccine was already “ready” in some labs before any lockdowns started. Actually doing all the testing, mass producing it, preserving it, transporting it, storing - probably took most of the time.

    • Kimano@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I mean also isn’t the hpv vaccine kinda functionally a cancer vaccine

    • ph00p@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Oh boy, that could also go horribly wrong too, what if a cell is a little bit retarded in it’s growth for some reason but would develop into a useful cell but, NOPE body killed it.

      • VeryAmaze
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Aaaand that’s one reason it’s taking time to develop a proper vaccine.

      • frezik@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        It could, but it’s also improving on something your immune system already does. Out of all the trillions of cells undergoing division in your body all the time, a few of them go cancerous each and every day. Your immune system almost always takes them out. It’s the one time out of a bajilion that things go wrong.