The promising cancer vaccine, which teaches the body to destroy tumors, sends three patients in remission

An anti-cancer vaccine that teaches the body how to fight tumors has put three patients with lymphoma in remission.

The vaccine is injected directly into the tumor and teaches the immune system to destroy it, as well as to look for other cancer cells.

The researchers tested 11 patients with lymphoma and said that some were in complete remission for months or even years.

The trials have been so successful that experts believe that it offers hope for many other cancers, including those of the bad, head, and neck.

Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York tested the treatment – injected directly into the tumor to stimulate the immune system – in 11 patients

Although the treatment is called a vaccine, it does not prevent cancer. Instead, it teaches the person's immune system how to fight the disease.

Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York have injected tumors into a stimulant that recruits immune cells called dendritic cells.

After treating the tumor with a low dose of radiotherapy, a second stimulant was injected, which activated the dendritic cells.

This study then asked T cells to kill cancer cells throughout the body, while treating non-cancer cells, according to the study published in Nature Medicine.

This led to the remission of three of the patients while the treatment reduced the initial target tumor and another one throughout the body.

People with lymphoma have abnormal lymphocytes – white blood cells that help fight the infection – that have separated.

Lymphocytes can accumulate in any part of the body, most commonly in the armpits, neck or groin.

Lead author, Dr. Joshua Brody, director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at the Tisch Institute Against Cancer, said: "The in-situ vaccine approach has vast implications for several types of cancer. "

In laboratory tests on mice, the vaccine has significantly increased the success of control point blocking immunotherapy.

According to the researchers, combined immune therapy was at least three times more potent than checkpoint blockage or the vaccine itself.

They are "extremely optimistic" about the effectiveness of this treatment in subsequent trials and have even described the tumor after treatment as a "cancer vaccine factory".

Dr. Eric Jacobsen, Clinical Director of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Lymphoma Program, told CNBC that the results were interesting, but additional research was needed because it was important to understand the results. a small study.

Dr. Jacobsen, who did not participate in the study, said: "It's definitely a proof of concept, but more important studies are really needed and additional strategies to try to make so that more than three out of 11 patients answer ".

However, the results warranted another clinical trial in March on lymphoma patients, as well as bad and head and neck cancers.

It is also laboratory tested in liver and ovarian cancer.

The experts praised the results of the study.

Dr. Silvia Formenti, chair of radiation oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, who did not attend, said that "it was really promising."

She told CNBC: "And the fact that you get not only answers in the treated areas, but also off the field [of treatment with radiation] is really important.

Lymphoma cancer is a cancer of the lymphatic system that is part of the immune system. There are two main types – Hodgkin's lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Each year, approximately 1,700 people are diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in the United Kingdom and 8,110 in the United States.

And 13,500 Britons with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and about 74,200 Americans.