Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are three of the most commonly used tools to fight cancer. For some types of cancer, these treatments are extremely effective. However, for pancreatic cancer, these traditional therapies are not always sufficient.
For example, even though surgery can be used to remove all traces of a tumor, the disease often returns after a while. This is because pancreatic cancer spreads outside the pancreas undetected at an earlier stage than other cancers. This microscopic spread of disease cannot be removed by surgery and can only be treated with chemotherapy drugs. Unfortunately for pancreatic cancer, current chemotherapies have limited effectiveness in many patients. This situation makes it very difficult in the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Cancer and the Immune System
Cancer, It takes advantage of how the body's immune system (or defense system) works. Cancer cells are not recognized as a threat by immune cells. Cancer cells can escape the immune system, grow, and spread throughout the body.
Immunotherapy uses drugs to help the body's immune system recognize and attack cancer. Doctors and scientists around the world are actively investigating immunotherapy to treat a variety of cancers, including pancreatic cancer.
Developing Pancreatic Cancer Vaccines
Scientists have developed a new vaccine that helps the body's immune system detect and then fight cancer.
A group of researchers is currently working on this is testing its pancreatic cancer vaccine in clinical trials. Researchers are striving to learn more about how vaccine therapy could improve pancreatic cancer treatment. While most vaccines are administered to prevent the disease, this vaccine can be used in patients who have already been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The vaccine consists of inactivated pancreatic cancer cells. Scientists manipulate these cells to release a certain molecule that attracts immune cells to cancer cells. They have bred it.
Vaccine treatment causes the body to attack cancer cells in the pancreas and anywhere else in the body where cancer could spread. The vaccine's ability to protect against metastatic disease (when cancer has spread from the pancreas to another organ) is key because many treatments to date for systemic pancreatic cancer have proven effective in the long term.
Researchers say this continues to investigate exactly how therapies can best benefit patients. So far this vaccine offers a lot of potential in fighting pancreatic cancer.
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