London- In a ground-breaking discovery, German scientists arrived at a positive finding expected to later help in the realization of cancer fighting vaccines, reported the scientific journal “Nature”.
Mining a series of genetic encoding specialized to take down malignant proteins, the vaccine works on boosting its capacity then reintroducing it into other RNA strands. The RNA strands would then provoke a rapid response from the immune system—however this time it would target cancer cells instead.
More specifically, adjusting the nanoparticles’ electrical charge would trigger a response from the dendritic cells to fight the cancer similar to how it battles viruses. The vaccine used was fast and at a reasonably priced production, which could encode with RNA any cancer antigens or molecules.
The scientists had taken pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles and then injected the mixture into the bloodstreams of three patients.
The three patients’ immune systems responded by producing “killer” T-cells designed to attack cancer.
The scientists look forward to developing vaccines which fight all kinds of cancer. Professor Ugur Sahin from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany said “[Such] vaccines are fast and inexpensive to produce, and virtually any tumour antigen [a protein attacked by the immune system] can be encoded by RNA,” wrote “Nature”.
“Thus, the nanoparticulate RNA immunotherapy approach introduced here may be regarded as a universally applicable novel vaccine class for cancer immunotherapy,” said Professor Sahin.
As for the funds for developing the ground-breaking discovery, scientists, most of whom work at U.S. academic and other institutions, proposed what they called the Human Genome Project–Write.
They said they hoped to get $100 million in public and private funding to launch it this year and expect total costs of less than the $3 billion used for the original Human Genome Project that completely mapped human DNA for the first time in 2003, Reuters reported.