The most widely used vaccines against Covid-19 may have a surprising benefit for some cancer patients, as they appear to stimulate their immune systems to help them fight tumors.
Preliminary research published yesterday, Wednesday, in the journal Nature, showed that patients with advanced lung or skin cancer who received certain immunotherapy drugs lived significantly longer if they had received a dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines within 100 days of starting their treatment.
These results have nothing to do with coronavirus infection. Rather, the study indicates that the molecule responsible for the effectiveness of these vaccines, which is messenger RNA, appears to help the immune system respond better to modern immunotherapies against cancer, according to researchers from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Florida.
“The vaccine acts like a siren, activating immune cells throughout the body,” said lead researcher Dr. Adam Gribbin of MD Anderson. “We are making immune-resistant tumors more responsive to immunotherapy.”
This comes at a time when US Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. raised doubts about messenger RNA vaccines, announcing a $500 million funding cut for certain uses of this technology.