A 67-year-old London man with lung cancer has been the first to receive a new cancer vaccine as part of an international trial. The early-stage research will test the immune therapy’s safety and whether it can be used together with existing cancer treatments. When you hear ‘vaccine,’ you probably think of the jab for the flu or COVID-19.
However, a vaccine is any substance that helps the body’s immune system recognize and fight diseases, including cancer. A 67-year-old lung cancer patient from London has been the first recipient of a new investigational cancer vaccine at the National Health Service (NHS) University College London Hospitals (UCLH). “Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with an estimated 1.
8 million deaths in 2020,” said Siow Ming Lee, professor of medical oncology at University Hospital London and leader of the UK arm of the study. “We are now entering this very exciting era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer ..
. We hope this will provide an opportunity to further improve outcomes for our NSCLC [non-small cell lung cancer] patients, whether in the early or advanced stages.” Non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, is one of two primary kinds of lung cancer and is the most common kind.
The other kind is small cell lung cancer (SCLC). In NSCLC, cancer cells originate in the lung tissue, and although it grows slower than the small cell variant, NSCLC has often spread to.