The Russian Ministry of Health has announced that it has developed a vaccine against cancer that will be distributed to Russian patients for free from early 2025.
According to TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency, Andrey Kaprin—the General Director of the Radiology Medical Research Center of the Russian Ministry of Health—recently announced the development on Russian radio.
The vaccine will apparently be used to treat cancer patients rather than given to the general public to prevent cancer—and it will be personalized to each patient.
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The Director of the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, Alexander Gintsburg, previously told TASS that the vaccine could suppress tumor growth and stop cancer from spreading.
It is currently not clear which cancers the vaccine is supposed to treat, how effective it is, or even what the vaccine is called.
It is scientifically feasible that some sort of vaccine may have been developed to target cancer. Other countries are currently working to develop something similar.
For example, in 2023 the U.K. government signed a contract with a German biotechnology company to develop personalized cancer treatments, and pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck & Co are currently working on a skin cancer vaccine.
There are even vaccines already on the market that aim to prevent cancer, such as vaccines against human papillomaviruses (HPV), which help prevent cervical cancer.
In the U.S., neuroscientists at the University of Florida have been testing a potential personalized mRNA vaccine for brain cancer.
A paper published in May in the scientific journal Cell explained the results of a human trial involving four cancer patients after the neuroscientists had already tested the treatment on terminally ill pet dogs.
The way that the treatment works—which may be similar to the Russian vaccine—is that genetic material called RNA is extracted from each patient’s surgically removed tumor.
Then, messenger RNA (mRNA)—the blueprint of what is inside each cell—is amplified and wrapped in newly designed fatty nanoparticles, making the tumor cells appear dangerous to the cancer patient’s immune system.
The researchers found that, in less than two days, the patient’s immune systems became responsive to the cancer cells and began attacking them.
The patients involved in the study all either lived disease-free for longer than expected or survived for longer than expected. The scientists concluded that this treatment may be a future option for immunotherapy.
