A revolutionary cancer vaccine that can eliminate tumours even after they have spread throughout the body is to go into human trials.

The move follows trials on mice in which the treatment worked “startlingly well”, according to researchers, with 90% of the animals cured after one injection, and the rest after a second jab.

The team at Stanford University, in California, say that “injecting tiny amounts of two drugs directly into a tumour not only kills the original cancer, but also triggers an ‘amazing bodywide’ reaction which destroys distant cancer cells”, reported The Daily Telegraph.

The drug combination works by “switching on immune cells inside the tumours which have been deactivated by the cancer, then boosting them so they can go to work killing the disease”, the newspaper adds.

“When we use these two agents together, we see the elimination of tumours all over the body,” said Professor Ronald Levy, who led the study.

“This approach bypasses the need to identify tumour-specific immune targets and doesn’t require wholesale activation of the immune system or customisation of a patient’s immune cells.”

For the human trial, “Levy plans to recruit 15 patients with low-grade lymphoma”, says the Daily Mail. “If successful, Levy believes the treatment could be useful for many tumour types.”

In the future, he believes oncologists“could inject both [agents] into solid tumours in humans before surgery as a way to prevent recurrence from stray tumours that spread but weren’t detected,” according to the newspaper.

“I don’t think there’s a limit to the type of tumour we could potentially treat, as long as it has been infiltrated by the immune system,” Levy said.

Levy and his team “deserve a lot of credit” for testing the combined treatment on a strain of mouse that is prone to spontaneously develop breast tumours – which mimics how cancer arises in humans, immunologist Drew Pardoll, of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in Baltimore, Maryland, told Science magazine.

But “the big question is whether the approach works in people, as most rodent cancer therapies don’t translate to humans”, the magazine notes.

Cancer treatment has progressed where many types are treatable and preventable but still there is no talk of eradication, instead the projected numbers for the future rise; cancer will affect everyone by 2050 with the biggest numbers coming from skin cancers as the planet heatens.

Some years ago Cancer UK stated that people are surviving cancer more than those that lose the battle, which would suggest we are beating the disease on the whole. A vaccine is in development in all large laboratories but recently we have news of a claim to be able to treat all types of malignant cell duplication.

Smallpox (aka variola,) was eradicated as recently ago as 1979 through vaccination. Not that I am a proponent of vaccinations, but if it is a necessary step towards eradication, as opposed to longer term use of the drug, then who would doubt its validity.

In this case it is cowpox, a virus that moves effectively between animal and human and which was first passed by milkmaids handling cow’s udders. The cowpox is mixed with other viruses (like the main three that cause the common cold: Rhinovirus, Coronavirus and Adenovirus, to create a mix that appears to fight cancer per se.

Breakthrough as scientists create a new cowpox-style virus that can kill EVERY type of cancer

Scientists have created a new cowpox-style virus in a bid to cure cancer. The treatment, called CF33, can kill every type of cancer in a petrie dish and has shrunk tumours in mice, The Daily Telegraph reported.

US cancer expert Professor Yuman Fong is engineering the treatment, which is being developed by Australia biotech company Imugene.

They are hoping the treatment will be tested on breast cancer patients, among other cancer sufferers, next year.

Professor Fong is currently in Australia to organise the clinical trials, which will also be run overseas.

Patients with triple negative breast cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, bladder, gastric and bowel cancer would be tested in the ‘basket study’.

Success with mice does not ensure the virus will be able to treat humans, but Professor Fong remains positive, as other specific viruses have been effective in fighting cancer in humans.

The virus, which causes the common cold, was turned into a treatment for brain cancer by scientists in the US. The cancer in some patients disappeared for years before it came back, while others saw tumours shrink considerably.

Similarly, a form of the cold sore virus called Imlygic or T-Vec was found to be able to treat melanoma, as it helped the body’s immune system recognise and destroy tumours and melanoma cells in the body.

“There was evidence that viruses could kill cancer from the early 1900s when people vaccinated against rabies had their cancer disappear, they went into remission,” Professor Fong said.

But there were concerns viruses could be too toxic for humans and turn fatal.

“The problem was if you made the virus toxic enough to kill cancer you were worried it would also kill man,” he said.

Professor Fong said cowpox – which proved to successfully protect people from smallpox 200 years ago – is known to be harmless in humans. By mixing cowpox with other viruses, testing found it could kill cancer.

Cancer patients would have the engineered virus injected directly into their tumours for the breakthrough treatment.

It’s hoped the virus would infect the cancer cells and make them explode. The immune system is then expected to be alerted about other cancer cells in the body, prompting the diseased cells to be killed.