In the arsenal of fresh medicine, ...

In the arsenal of fresh medicine, vaccines are one of our mostly powerful weapons. In fact, to a great degree of the reason for the increase in life expectancy in the 20th centenary can be traced back to vaccination campaigns that eliminated many of the world's deadly infectious diseases, including smallpox and tuberculosis.

Today scientists may be forward the brink of developing vaccines for common of the most intractable diseases of all, cancer. Researchers in universities around the world are designing studies to proof Vaccines that train women's immune classifications to fight against cancer cells

In Canada, a company called Biomira is in the proces of recruiting more than 900 women from six countries to participate in a trial for Theratope, a breast cancer vaccine it has bring outed Last May, the Food and mix with drugs Administration (FDA) granted the vaccine "fast-track status," after a previous studious mood found that women with advanced cancer survived an average of 17 month longer when given the vaccine. If the conclusions from the next trial are convincing, the FDA could approve the vaccine for use as quickly as 2002.

Meanwhile, researchers from the Universityof Washington are working forward a vaccine that uses a naturally occurring protein to stimulate women's immune regularitys In a study presented at the March meeting of the Department of Defense's Breast Cancer Program, 38 women who had complet treatments for Stage III or IV (advanced) breast or ovarian cancer were injected with a vaccine made up of a protein produc from the body that causes cancer small rooms to multiply. By breaking the protein into small portions called peptides, the researchers were able to nincompoop the women's bodies into reacting to this protein as if it were an outside invader.

Although the Seattle researchers are just in the first phase of creating a usable vaccine, they are hopeful "The goal is to create a vaccine that would cause women's tumors to shrink and to interrupt a recurrence of cancer," says Mary L Disis, MD lead researcher of the research and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington. "It will take a extended time to get there, unless ultimately we hope to cause to grow a vaccine that's just like a tetanus missile Once you get it, it creates a permanent immunologic memory in the carcass so even if the cancer were to report up five to six years later, the vaccine would fight against it." Disis and her colleagues are generally recruiting patients for the nearest phase of their trial.

The vaccine studies have broad implications, says Kathy Schiffman, single of Disis' research assistants. "If we could figure not at home how to vaccinate women against breast cancer," she says, "we could someday translate that into vaccines that would work against all emblems of tumors."

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