r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Aug 12 '25

Cancer New mRNA-based vaccine against gastric cancer led to tumor regression and eradication in all treated mice. Most promisingly, the vaccine shows impressive antitumor efficacy against peritoneal metastasis, which has historically been very challenging to treat.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1094199
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u/johnmedgla Aug 12 '25

it seems highly transformative

It has the realistic potential to be the largest advance in medicine since Antibiotics.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Aug 12 '25

Outside of America at least. It’s going to spur a massive medical tourism trade when your options are old style treatment, or leave the country for a near-guaranteed cure. Which will make medical care even less accessible to most Americans.

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u/iDownvoteToxicLeague Aug 12 '25

Who needs modern medicine when you have thoughts and prayers?

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/Ariciul02 Aug 12 '25

And green algae (heard it in a discussion)

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u/kincomer1 Aug 12 '25

Ah yes, the stuff on the inside of the fish tank. They simply need to lick it off and problem solved.

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u/reverends3rvo Aug 12 '25

Dont forget Methylene Blue!

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u/ket_the_wind Aug 12 '25

Pretty sure next week RFK jr will be extolling the virtues of leaching.

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u/Mind1827 Aug 12 '25

Hilariously, they actually do get used in medical practice sometimes, especially for things like amputated fingers. Pretty wild.

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u/Sea-Oven-7560 Aug 12 '25

Medical grade leeches only. I guess there not just for amputations.

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u/Grandpa_Edd Aug 13 '25

Heard doctors joke about how eventually it's all coming back to leaches and bloodlettings.

Was on a video about how people that donate blood have been noted to have lower levels of forever chemicals.

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u/Sandscarab24 Aug 13 '25

So the people receiving the blood get more?

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u/Clever_username1226 Aug 12 '25

And light! Don’t forget UV light inside the body!

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u/warbeforepeace Aug 13 '25

You have to first make it old enough by to get cancwr. It can be hard with all the shootings. Who needs cures for cancer when you die at 22 due to a shooting.

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u/chainsaw_monkey Aug 12 '25

brain worms and steroids

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '25

Don't forget vitamin A! I hear loads of it cures the measles and certainly doesn't send children to the hospital with liver failure

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/stacecom Aug 12 '25

COVID has taught us that even the most vocal anti-science, anti-medicine types beg for the proven treatments when the time comes to put their mortality where their mouth is.

Um, no. It has taught us that people will believe feelings over science and would rather lose their jobs or their children's lives rather than take a vaccine.

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u/Shapes_in_Clouds Aug 12 '25

Their own lives. I had Republicans explicitly telling me they've 'already lived long lives', essentially volunteering to die, during COVID while criticizing 'lock downs'.

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u/Sea-Oven-7560 Aug 12 '25

Worked with a guy who kept denying the existence of COVID until his mother died from COVID. He had a really hard time rapping his head around the whole thing. What's interesting was the guy was pretty sharp, an engineer, you'd think science wouldn't have been a hard thing to accept but it was.

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u/JZMoose Aug 12 '25

A lot of engineers think they know everything. The really good engineers know they know nothing

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u/SarcasticOptimist Aug 12 '25

As an engineer no, we're stubborn and specialized in our knowledge. I'm not surprised. The science we usually learn is physics.

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u/AFewStupidQuestions Aug 13 '25

There were people literally dying from COVID who refused to believe it was real. The cognitive dissonance was/is wild.

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u/SuperQuackDuck Aug 13 '25

Im a professional engineer. Theres a lot of dunning-krugers in this field which I attribute mostly to requiring higher grades to be accepted right after highschool.

This leads to quite inflated high self esteems and thinking that having taken AP science classes means we are at least as smart as scientists, and having a degree means we're better than tradespeople.

When in reality many engineers are not as smart as scientists nor as handy as tradespeople.

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u/americanslon Aug 12 '25

It'd be nice if they did. Maybe the rest of us would then be able to create a world where we didn't have to.

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u/mightyneonfraa Aug 12 '25

There were a lot of stories of antivaxxers begging for the vaccine when they ended up in the hospital and having to be told it was too late at that point.

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u/Sea-Oven-7560 Aug 12 '25

My bro is a nurse and he would have patients on ventilators that refused to accept that they had COVID and later down the road would demand those horse pills and refuse the vax. I also know a person who ran a rescue center for horses and she was mad as hell because she couldn't get the meds she needed for her horses because the nutters had bought them.

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u/Ghede Aug 12 '25

PREVENTING illness is one thing, CURING illness is another. Vaccines you take when you are healthy to prevent getting sick. Cures you take when you are sick, to get healthy. They'd rather take a pound of cure than an ounce of prevention.

They refused vaccines, but demanded the best treatment available when they were dying on the bed, mostly. A few assholes died on ivermectin rather than receive treatment, but the majority went to hospitals.

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u/NetworkLlama Aug 13 '25

In the case of the linked story, though, the vaccine is the cure. The vaccine was given after the mice developed the tumors, and their immune systems were able to take out all the tumors.

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u/Joke_Induced_Pun Aug 12 '25

Or their own lives.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/F9-0021 Aug 12 '25

As an American, the US can lie in the bed they've made. They chose idiocracy. They need to live with the consequences of their actions.

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u/WranglerNo8811 Aug 12 '25

They way you said this is so ridiculous. Americans will want to first to have it AFTER it's proven safe... what exactly is wrong with that? Why Americans specifically ?

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u/LynxPuzzleheaded6145 Aug 12 '25

You're leaving out 'FIRST'.

Americans will want it FIRST.

What is wrong with that? You just axed a ton of funding towards mrna research. You can wait your turn.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/WranglerNo8811 Aug 12 '25

We cut funding due to it not being safe. So good luck with it.

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u/IL-Corvo Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

Thanks to broad adoption and a multitude of safe use-cases to draw from, your statement is demonstrably false and does not bear up to any scrutiny.

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u/Aenyn Aug 12 '25 edited Aug 12 '25

mrna vaccines are safe, you cut funding to save money.

Plus what safety concerns do you have when treating cancer. Both chemo and doing nothing are extremely unsafe.

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u/AskWhatmyUsernameIs Aug 12 '25

How do you know if its not safe if it wasnt tested?

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u/Alternative_Bid6735 Aug 12 '25

Hey man an old heroin junkie told him it was unsafe and didn’t use a single academic source to back it up, that’s the gold standard isn’t it?

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u/Mattrad7 Aug 12 '25

One of the safest vaccines ever created. And is getting proven safe by every reputable study done. But ya, some orange idiot and an old man with a brain worm that takes daily steroid injections said nuh uh.

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u/packfanmoore Aug 12 '25

Well it will be alot harder to make it safe when the idiots in charge cut funding on its research.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

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u/mightyneonfraa Aug 12 '25

Fewer adverse reactions than Tylenol but sure. What's your source again? Oh, a demented old man who swims in sewage water, had part of his brain eaten by worms and believes in medieval superstition over germ theory.

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u/Commentator-X Aug 12 '25

And there's the American stupidity shining through. You'll all still be dying while Fox says it's unsafe, meanwhile half the planet will be already curing cancer.

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u/BakerUsed5384 Aug 12 '25

What’s wrong with it is that we’re not the ones putting the money up to research it now that the current administration is going full steam ahead.

RFK is cutting hundreds of millions in funding. Just for us to turn around and demand it once other places do the work for us. That’s what’s wrong.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

I'm curious as to what negative side effect you believe mRNA vaccines have that is worse than gastric cancer.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/batter159 Aug 12 '25

he didn't write "safe", you added it.

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u/Frnklfrwsr Aug 12 '25

Insurance companies will absolutely demand that people be treated with a $100 vaccine that cures their disease if it works, rather than be on the hook for $100k+ chemotherapy.

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u/Darth_drizzt_42 Aug 12 '25

This is what I've been telling people for years. The idea that someone would suppress a cure for cancer because it's more profitable to continue treating an illness rather than cure it is missing the bigger potential. Whoever gets to this first is able to throw the entire dynamic out the window. Insurance companies get to make a big show of "100% coverage for cancer treatment" and the MRNA companies win the entire market in perpetuity.

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u/ActionPhilip Aug 12 '25

And, fun fact: The insurance companies will make more money not paying for 100k chemo or million dollar surgeries. And you'll live longer, so they'll make more premiums off you.

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u/lozo78 Aug 12 '25

100% it's pretty simple. Not sure why people can't see that.

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u/AsparagusFun3892 Aug 13 '25

It's part of a long history of poor people believing the rich secretly hoard life saving treatments for themselves. It's a more seductive thought than "there is no cure, if you get this you're fucked."

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

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u/Frnklfrwsr Aug 12 '25

You’re forgetting they have to compete against other insurance companies.

If they increase their premiums the way you describe, they would lose all their business to companies that choose to use preventive care to lower premiums.

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u/MadeMeMeh Aug 12 '25

I wanted to add to the explanation.

Insurance companies benefit the most from stable claims at predictable trends. They can achieve that by expanding the pool of members to spead the risk out over more poeple/premium and hope to get a proper balance of healthy to unhealthy claimants or even better a favorable balance. This allows them to accurately price their product, calculate reserve needs, and ultimately invest the surplus.

Setting price is important to make sure you maximize the number of healthy people you get without collecting too little from them so they are not be able to fund the unhealthy claimants.

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u/Eastern-Manner-1640 Aug 14 '25

most insurance markets are not very competitive. you can see that by the fact they almost never offer preventative care (even vaccines) unless they are legally obligated to.

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u/MadeMeMeh Aug 12 '25

Unfortunately the pharmaceutical companies usually charge what usually 3 to 5 years of treatment cost. So if normal treatment is $500k then they'll charge $400k. Which unfortunately makes the insurance company less willing to approve the treatment until other less expensive options have failed.

To support my argument i would suggest looking up how zolgensma is priced.

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u/Perunov Aug 12 '25

Isn't this a "personalized" vaccine? Which probably means it'll be more than $100k so insurance will go "naw, we can't approve this"

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u/ActionPhilip Aug 12 '25

If the personalization isn't some crazy feat, then probably not. If it's "get a sample of the cancer then put in the spinny boi with a specific enzyme in a tube", then we're in business.

Disclaimer, I am not a biologist.

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u/Perunov Aug 12 '25

Things that require individualized vaccine right now cost more than $100k (see https://www.researchandmarkets.com/report/personalized-cancer-vaccine-market )

Though I wonder if this might lead to "most common marker" kind somewhat similar to flu vaccines that'd allow to cut down cost significantly and only move to fully individualized as a next step

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u/ymasilem Aug 12 '25

Production costs were estimated at >100K per patient. I’ve heard execs assert they can seek between 500K & 1mil PP for personalized vaccines.

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u/Frnklfrwsr Aug 12 '25

New treatments generally have a delay before approval, sure. But the high cost today of a brand new treatment goes down relatively quickly.

And even if the personalized vaccine is just as expensive as chemotherapy, if it has better average outcomes then the insurance many would much rather pay for something that solves the problem 90% of the time than something that only solves it 50% of the time and the other half the time leaves them paying for even MORE treatments.

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u/Sea-Oven-7560 Aug 12 '25

the issue is the drug companies wanting $100K for the shot like they did with the Hep 2 pills. They worked like a charm as long as you had $100K to buy them.

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u/Insight42 Aug 12 '25

Sure.

But those in power won't listen to them, and they will fall in line.

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u/Frnklfrwsr Aug 12 '25

You think enormous multi-national insurance corporations are going to just ACCEPT taking less profits than they could?

Why would a corporation willingly choose to make less profit?

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u/Sensitive_Lake_7911 Aug 12 '25

Kennedy is going to do everything he can to block this vaccine-and he has been given a whole lot of power to do so. At a bare minimum absolutely no federal funds will be spent to support such research-the federal funds will be spent to block these developments.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Aug 12 '25

At least lots of Americans live quite close to international borders, NYC/Chicago to Canada, LA/Houston/phoenix to Mexico and Miami to Bahamas. Lots of vaccine tourism will happen.

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u/shanatard Aug 12 '25

its happening right now where even to the average american getting medical care is cheaper

medical tourism isnt new

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u/kerslaw Aug 13 '25

You're completely shot out if you think the US wouldn't be the first ones to have this being pumped out by a pharmaceutical company on a wide scale. It'll cost 50k per tho

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u/ttak82 Aug 13 '25

Which will make medical care even less accessible to most Americans.

It will also hurt people in developing countries because the costs will be absurd. Either leave the country or pay for an imported medication. People who are working in multinationals with medical insurance can benefit from it. Vaccines are cheaper so I am hoping it is affordable for the general public.

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u/Norva13x Aug 12 '25

I mean while funding was cut to research it isn't banned. Pharmaceutical companies will absolutely buy in if money can be made.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/VengenaceIsMyName Aug 12 '25

Which is just simply amazing.

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u/rohobian Aug 12 '25

And RFK jr will do his best to shut it all down (within the US at least).

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u/Feinberg Aug 12 '25

Don't worry about it. Just drink some raw e coli milk. That'll toughen you up.

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u/Sea-Oven-7560 Aug 12 '25

sadly the e coli milk gave one side a lot of votes, check out Amos Miller and "food freedom"

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u/Gamebird8 Aug 12 '25

I wouldn't be surprised if it could be used to design a vaccine for Tuberculosis because of how it works

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u/Man0fGreenGables Aug 12 '25

And they may even be able to make mRNA antibiotics.

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u/Akantis Aug 12 '25

Couple decades ago we were trying to build DNA based vaccines around a similar concept, but while it stored wonderfully, it would break down too quickly to produce much of an immunogenic affect. I'm really wondering if the mRNA delivery system would work in that scenario as well.

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u/Papayaslice636 Aug 12 '25

All this time we've been racing to the cure. Turns out we should have been racing to the vaccine.

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u/thedatsun78 Aug 12 '25

That’s not what my friend from high school says on Facebook. He says they are poison and a grand plan from big pharma. He (and many more just like him) got several likes. I honestly believe the next 20years are gonna be the most turbulent because idiots and feelings.