We're Running Out of Infectious Diseases, So Let's Make A Cancer Vaccine
The title is utterly absurd, I know, but not if you're a vaccine manufacturer looking for another cash cow. Treating cancer with a vaccine has been a wet dream of scientists for decades. It's not often you have a disease that affects 50 percent of the population at some point in their lives. However, just like every other disease, cancer is not something that can be treated with chemicals and foreign DNA--a concept few vaccine scientists will ever admit to. Vaccines that attempt to thwart cancer cells will always prove better in theory than in practice, and at least some researchers are finally understanding why.
That never comes as a big surprise to most advocates in the natural health community, since no vaccine has ever been fully evaluated in humans to assess long-term health risks. HPV vaccines are no exception.
However, scientists are again being criticized for their persistence in engineering additional vaccines for a variety of cancers they know will never work in a practical sense. The idea is always supported by ongoing trials of so-called therapeutic cancer vaccines, which effectively shrink tumors in cell cultures in the lab, but it takes scientists a few years to figure out that the human body is not a few cell cultures in a lab.
When every single one of these promising vaccine candidates, including ones against melanoma and lymphoma, are tested in patients, they always fail.
Just five years ago, researchers from the University of Missouri and Imperial College London found evidence suggesting why vaccines directed against the virus that causes AIDS and many cancers do not work.
Another researcher, Willem Overwijk, an associate professor in the department of melanoma medical oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and his colleagues found that instead of zeroing in on the tumor, vaccines that were injected in mice started to attack the adjuvant (designed to generate antibodies against bacteria and viruses) inside the vaccines. "While the vaccine successfully activates T cells, those T cells then circle back to the injection site where the mineral oil is still sitting under the skin," says Overwijk. "Very few T cells make it to the tumor; they prefer to go back to the vaccination site."
Essentially, he says, the vaccine is competing with the tumor for the attention of the immune cells, and the vaccine, because of its powerful ability to stimulate the defensive cells, tends to be more dominant. "That explains why we find nice levels of T cells in blood after vaccination but no correlation with a response against tumors in patients," says Overwijk.
Prof. Alexander M.M. Eggermont of the Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, Paris-Sud, and Universite Paris-Sud, Kremlin Bicetre, France and Coordinator of this study says, "These results clearly indicate that we do not fully comprehend the impact, on the whole, of multiple vaccinations. The effects of such vaccinations might well be detrimental as was clear at the time of the interim analysis that stopped this trial..."
But it seems this medical mirage of treating cancer with a vaccine will just not end, as trials have recently begun to use an anti-cancer vaccine implant for melanoma. The experimental implant is claimed to have worked on lab mice in 2009 according the researchers.
"It is rare to get a new technology tested in the laboratory and moved into human clinical trials so quickly," said Glenn Dranoff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and part of the research team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
The device releases a protein that attracts immune cells and sends them out armed to hunt down and kill tumor cells. Again the theoretical approach will send scientists back to the drawing board when they realize that antigens will never bind to any tumor being targeted through an implant that bypasses the respiratory tract, which is the only established mechanism to initiate antibodies through a natural immune response via secretory IgA. This antibody plays a critical role in immunity. More IgA is produced in mucosal linings than all other types of antibodies combined and it's one of the reasons that vaccines don't work. You will never stimulate an appropriate immune response to any foreign entity through bypassing the mucosal linings of the body. It's a simple concept, yet vaccine scientists refuse to acknowledge it.
The Province of Nova Scotia in Canada is lending $5 million to clinical-stage biotech Immunovaccine, to develop another vaccine for ovarian and brain cancer due out next year. The Halifax based company is also leveraging its platform in the development of anthrax vaccines (just to give you an idea where their heads are at).
Even experimental breast cancer vaccines have been developed by prestigious cancer centers such as John Hopkins. Many patients have died through experimental breast cancer vaccine trials on behalf of John Hopkins. The vaccine didn't work for Peggy Murphy from Lancaster County, Pa and she often wondered why before she passed away as medical officials gave her false hope as they always do.
In fact, vaccines are being developed for almost every major cancer that exists. Researchers are working on vaccines for lung cancer, colon cancer, and even organ cancers. The madness doesn't stop there. Scientists are even attempting to target a molecule found in 90 percent of all cancers, so they can create a universal cancer vaccine for any cancer at all.
The truth is that no cancer vaccine will ever defeat cancer. Never! Every research group developing these vaccines has a fundamental lack of understanding of what cancer is. Moreover, they consistently ignore biological mechanisms which underlie the foundation of both specific and non-specific components in immunity which will always govern adaptive immunity. Consequently, 99% of scientific research in the area of vaccines and disease is unfounded and based on long-standing myths that science continues to state as fact.
Dave Mihalovic is a Naturopathic Doctor who specializes in vaccine research, cancer prevention and a natural approach to treatment.