Sunday, August 31, 2008

Cancer Vaccine : Pills that will change your life

Rather than designing a drug to cure cancer, current research focuses on developing drugs to help the body fight cancer itself. Cancer vaccines would boost the body’s own natural immune response so that naturally produced antibodies would attack the cancer cells and cure the disease. Currently, researchers have only tested the vaccine with melanoma [left], and the treatment still requires that the cancer fighting immune cells are altered in the lab and then returned to the body. However, once researchers figure out how to change the immune cells in vivo, it would only take a pill or a shot to get the body killing cancer for itself.

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