Monday, April 9, 2012

Cancer Vaccine will magically make us all live forever.

I've read quite a bit about this so called cancer vaccine ImMucin in the news the last several days because it is starting human trials and thought I would comment a bit.

First, let me say that I am most certainly not a biologist and my understanding of the science limited, but it seems the vaccine is designed to get the bodies immune system to to react to molecule called MUC1 which exists in about 90% of all cancers.  Typically cancer is not attacked by the immune system since it is seen as part of the body so it seems like the vaccine is essentially giving the immune system a way to differentiate the cancer from healthy cells.

Also, thanks to the shake weight,
we will all look like this at 90
...yes the men too.
It seems promising as far as I can tell, but the media is far over  hyping this.  Don't get me wrong, I really hope this treatment pans out because it sounds pretty damn amazing, but they have just barely started human trials, it may turn out to work on far few than the potential 90% of all cancers, or it may turn out to have some horrible side effects in large groups of people.  As usual there are lots of potential problems that most of the news articles seem to largely ignore.

Of course the comment sections of lots of these articles, like this one here, have quickly filled up with the typical conspiracy nut jobs who are claiming that "big pharma" will suppress the vaccine since they only make money off of sick people.  Here is just an example:
If an injection could cure cancer then all those hundreds of thousands of people who work in radiotherapy/chemotherapy department will need to be looking for other jobs. Many thousands of nurses and oncologists will also be jobless....and all the thousands who work for cancer 'charities'.And all the manufacturers of the machinery of radiotherapy/chemotherapty will also go bust....so job losses there too! I have a feeling that this injection will be disappearing....and never heard of again.
It is mostly nuts, since the company who is researching the vaccine is part of big pharma, but it won't stop them from saying I told you so if the treatment ends up being less effective than the news is selling it as being right now.  You just know that somehow it will be the fault of the scientists for not living up the hype the media created.

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