Why is it called a vaccine instead of a cure if it's causing tumors to regress? I normally think of vaccines as solely preventative.

Well I think we are also in an age of Covid vaccines that just mitigate symptoms and don’t necessarily prevent. I think it’s more that when I was growing up vaccines like the polio ones were presented as ways to prevent and eliminate a disease. But frankly I don’t care what they call it, if it could have saved my mom then let’s get this shit rolling.

Vaccines use your immune system to do the actual work. The type of vaccines you are thinking of basically teach your immune systen how to fight off a particular virus. These cancer vaccines basically teach your immune system to fight off cancer cells instead of viruses.

Calling it a cure is misleading in that cures are basically considered almost 100% effective but this approach, at least at this point, is only effective some or most of the time.

To add to this...

The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines use the genetic code for the spike protein on the outside of the virus.

Afaik, for a cancer vaccine you check what proteins are uniquely present on the surface of cancer cells, and then illicit an immune respone for that protein using an mRNA vaccine.

Basically the same logic. However, the difficulty with cancer vaccines is deciding which protein to target, not to mention the diversity of types of cancer.

Vaccines are used to train your immune system against a specific target. That's all a vaccine is.

The Rabies vaccine is actually given to you after you are infected. Same with the Shingles vaccine.

So a vaccine being preventative or not has nothing to due with the actual definition.

Excellent news for rats!

What animal should they have performed this test on in your opinion?

Echidna

Humans

SO how long before the pharma companies bury this and we never see it again?

I swear weve got like a hundred treatments that are just treatments now- how tf do we not have more solid ground than what we have rn?

It must be exhausting living in your head.

> Same with the Shingles vaccine.

They're giving Shingrex prophylactically now.

Non-sterilizing vs sterilizing vaccines.

@justsaysinmice

I've heard they don't chuckle.

For people who never got chickenpox and got the chickenpox vaccine?

The idea of shingles is reactivation of the chickenpox virus that's lying dormant in your body for decades. If you never had chickenpox as a kid, then you can't get shingles.

Hence, if you never had chickenpox and got the chickenpox vaccine, you don't need the shingles vaccine. If you are unsure, then you get the shingles vaccine just in case.

They arf.

Who the hell remembers if they got chickenpox 50 years ago? I would call that prophylaxis rather than therapeutics still.

Most people actually remember, it wasn't a fun time for them and it was an unique enough disease that they remember it (say compared to the common cold).

Plus even if you don't remember, the doctor's office will also have records of the chickenpox vaccine.

50 years ago we were still getting the smallpox vaccine and measles was more of a thing. The measles vaccine was introduced in Australia in 1968.

? I think you might have responded to the wrong comment brother

Nope. 50 years ago is early 70s and late 60s, there was no chickenpox vaccine, just smallpox as a general varicella vaccine.

Only for first world countries

:(

because big pharma doesn't want cures. They don't make as much money from cures, otherwise we probably would have cured a lot of diseases by now.

R.I.P Knuckles