Cancer cure and vaccine discovered in Valencia – but cannot be trialled for want of €50,000
Cancer cure and vaccine discovered in Valencia – but cannot be trialled for want of €50,000
A GROUND-BREAKING cancer vaccine for prevention and immune therapy for patients have been discovered by researchers at Valencia's La Fe hospital – but is unlikely to see the light of day due to lack of financing, scientists complain.
They have tested the drugs on laboratory rats and are now ready to carry out clinical trials, but need at last €50,000 to do so, covering a year's worth of salaries for investigtors.
According to dean of pharmacology at Valencia University and head of clinical pharmacology at La Fe, Dr Salvador Aliño, the vaccine has proven to be effctive against 'all types of cancer' in animals, provided it is administered before tumours form.
At present, the vaccine is only useful as a preventive tool, and would involve innoculating every member of the population who did not have cancer – which would be financially impossible for any country, Dr Aliño admits.
Once a tumour has formed, the vaccine would not work because in the process of cancer's appearing, the organism 'develops a certain level of tolerance' which the preventive drug is not capable of quashing.
For this reason, Dr Aliño and his research team in Valencia – Dr María José Herrero, Dr Antonio Miguel and Dr Luis Sendra – have been working on developing a medicine made with genetically-modified cells that effectively 'silences' the genes responsible for this 'tolerance' the tumour-developing process creates.
Once the 'tolerance genes' are 'silenced', the preventive vaccine can then be administered since it will now be able to work, and will disperse and destroy any cancerous cells present in the body at the time.
This means a complete cure for all types of cancer in just two injections with no side-effects.
Dr Aliño says his team has managed to block the molecule CTLA4 using antibodies directed at proteins in the surface of the cancer cells, but that another molecule, known as Foxp3, also creates 'tolerance' and is located inside the cancer cells rather than on the surface.
Researchers now want to ascertain whether combining the anti-cancer vaccine with the 'gene silencer' inside, as well as on the outside, of the cancer cells would be effective – and so far, it has proven to be in animals.
The next stage is to carry it out on humans via clinical trials.
But science in Spain is notoriously underfunded, despite some of the world's top talent and potential for the most life-changing discoveries coming out of the country.
With €50,000 for the clinical trials, the medication could be ready for use in mainstream hospital oncology departments within a year, says Dr Aliño.
And as this funding is not forthcoming, the experiments cannot reach the final stage – that of obtaining authorisation from the Spanish Healthcare Products and Medication Agency (AEMPS) to go onto the market.
Yet Dr Aliño says anti-cancer vaccinations are a 'very attractive alternative' because their cure potential is 'extremely high' and their risks to the patient are 'extremely low'.
Many researchers have contributed to their development since before the 1990s, but it has only been in the last decade that 'relevant successes' have been enjoyed.
