pharmaceutical company Modern announces the first cancer vaccineswhich could be available by 2030. “It’s a great advance,” says Ricardo Mourealthough they will not be preventive vaccines, but a treatment “very hopeful” for people who have already been diagnosed with the disease.
However, the scientist explains that to understand how it works, it is necessary to understand how cancer works. The body is made of thousands of cells, details the expert, and within them is our ADN. Over the years, this genetic information is damaged and, when a cell accumulates too much, it can become a tumor cell. It divides endlessly, invading the tissue, which eventually becomes a tumor.
They can even create their own blood vessels to carry food and oxygen to cells deeper within the tumor, and this carries “a very serious danger,” he says, that these cells may leak into the blood and reach other organs in the body. It is what is known as metastasis.
Moure clarifies that the body has defenses against cancerBut sometimes that system fails. In addition, he points out that in the phase of tumor formation, it is capable of “creating a kind of invisibility cloak against our defenses” and indicates that “what these Moderna vaccines are looking for is unmask cancer and our defenses attack it“.
