Over 100 patients to take part in new cancer vaccine trial

ODN

Patients in England with aggressive head and neck cancers will be fast-tracked into a new cancer vaccine trial. Professor Peter Johnson, the National Clinical Director for Cancer for NHS England says the new mRNA vaccine will  ''flag up the cancer more effectively”. Report by Gluszczykm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00This is a RNA vaccine, much like the COVID vaccines, but instead of having the COVID virus in it,

00:06it has HPV, human papillomavirus, in it. And what that does is it alerts the human immune system to

00:13the fact that that virus might be there. And that's important because that's present on some of these

00:18head and neck cancers. Normally we treat them by giving an antibody which blocks the off switch of

00:23the immune system and sets it off looking for the cancer. What we're trying to do here is flag up

00:29the cancer much more effectively by vaccinating against the particular proteins that are in that

00:33cancer so that the immune system doesn't have to go looking everywhere for it, but it can lock in

00:38on it much more readily.

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