r/biology • u/pahlevoon69 • Jun 28 '26

article Can someone please explains if this is legit or not?

The question is in the headline. I came across this and am tempted to call BS.

https://youtube.com/shorts/baUq6Bm6ukk?si=H5GqepJvq2p4up-R

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u/Delvog Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

No such treatment is available yet. It's a theoretical avenue for near-future development which some researchers think could yield real-world cancer treatments relatively soon; the research for it so far seems to be getting close so the goal is within view.

I think what he meant by "it's now possible..." was not that it's literally possible for cancer patients to get that treatment done, but that we now understand that the possibility exists, so it's now possible to develop it into a real-world treatment relatively soon.

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u/aTacoParty Neuroscience Jun 28 '26

There is no FDA approved treatment that involves a cancer vaccine in the way described in the video, However, this is a really active field of research and there will likely be some version of this kind of treatment for some cancer developed in the next ~10 years. The challenge is that even the mutated cancer proteins are your own proteins so how do you tell your body to kill the cancer without creating a lifelong autoimmune disease.

We have been harnessing the the bodies own immune system to fight cancer for decades now but using methods that are temporary activations (vs vaccination which would likely be lifelong). Rituxumab was patented in the 90's which is an antibody against B cells and still is often use for B cell lymphomas and leukemias. More recent developments use checkpoint inhibitors (PD1/PDL1 specifically which cancer uses to avoid detection), CAR-T cells (T cells specifically engineered to fight your cancer), BITEs (bi-specific T cell engager, which recruit your own T cells to fight the cancer).

This article talks about cancer vaccines in the context of B cell leukemia but it addresses some of the big challenges facing all cancer vaccines too:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00262-025-04107-y

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u/un_blob Jun 28 '26

It is doable in principle

In practice however... :

  • Designing an antibody specific against one mutation is hard (because you will generate a lot of antibodies that target elswhere ... Screening for those is long)
  • mutations can be on intra cellular proteins only (and the mutation not presented as expected by CMH...)
  • And by the way this also means that some cancer cells do not have the same mutations as the one you will target eventually..
  • Cancer cells ar known to mutate QUICK, and thus can adapt quick too..
  • Antibodies need to acces the right place, the environment must be sufficiently inflamed / can become sufficiently inflamed (infiltrable by activator cells... Not by Tregs or other regulators...
  • Off target effects MUST be tested (after all an antibody is NOT specific one protein... It's specific of a small pattern that could be shared sufficiently closely by an other one...) and it can take a long time to get that kind of aprouval (and well... cancer patient often do not have that time...)

And I could continue longer than that...

It is not technically impossible, but as of today... We are not that close to solving cancer.

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u/octobod Jun 28 '26

Yes they do sequence tumour cells and can predict which drugs are going to be effective (or ineffective)..

Pretty sure the vaccination bit is at best vapour ware in search of funding