This post is on Healthwise
19 April 2105
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about the vaccine controversy. Critics have challenged the effectiveness of vaccines and highlighted their dangers for years.
But recent research suggests at least one vaccine may have a valuable application no one ever imagined. Researchers looking into better ways to protect the brain have discovered a surprising new life-saving use for a vaccine that has been around since the 1920s.
Their work shows that a tetanus shot can boost survival rates among people battling a type of brain cancer that’s been considered a sure death sentence until now. Keep reading, it’s a remarkable story. . .
This variety of brain cancer, glioblastoma, is diagnosed in 20,000 Americans a year. It’s the brain cancer that killed Senator Ted Kennedy.
This difficult-to-treat cancer kills most victims in about twelve months. It’s usually inoperable and often attacks a part of the brain where radiation treatment is difficult, adjacent to neurons involved in memory and motor skills.
Calling on the Immune System
Your risk for this disease increases as you age. In the latest round of research about how to treat glioblastoma, the most promising treatment is proving to be immunotherapy, a technique that ramps up the immune system’s arsenal against cancer cells.
When cancer strikes, the cells in tumors often suppress the immune response, allowing malignant cells to escape attack by the body’s defenses. During immunotherapy, injections are given to people who are already stricken with cancer, in an effort to reawaken the immune response.
In the case of glioblastoma, studies show that the cancer cells are home to an activated form of cytomegalovirus (CMV), something that is not present in normal cells. Consequently, researchers have tried to boost the immune response to CMV in an effort to wipe out tumors.
To do this, scientists first take a blood sample from patients and culture what are called dendritic cells. Dendritic cells are immune cells that function like tiny detectives. Their job is to locate and identify viruses the body should be attacking and then convey an immunological “wanted poster” to cells called T cells.
Once T cells get the message, they form an immune cell posse that tracks down and kills the designated pathogens. (The type of wanted poster communicated by dendritic cells doesn’t say “Wanted: Dead or Alive;” it’s more like “Wanted: Dead and more Dead.”)
In the initial immunotherapy research, the mean survival time for cancer patients receiving the treatment was only about a year. But when a tetanus shot was added to the treatment, the patients generally lived from four to eight years.
“Patients with glioblastoma usually survive for little more than one year. However, in patients who received the immunotherapy (with the tetanus shot), half lived nearly five years or longer from their diagnosis, so the findings are promising and significant,” says researcher John Sampson, chief of the Division of Neurosurgery at Duke University Medical Center.
The reasons remain mysterious
Many of the details of exactly why the tetanus shot helps improve the immune response to cancer remain unknown. In lab tests, scientists did uncover the fact that the tetanus shot increases the production of a protein called CCL3 that apparently sends more of the injected dendritic cells into the body’s lymph nodes. When more of those cells get into the lymph nodes, they can interact more abundantly with T cells, sending them to attack cancer cells that contain CMV.
As you grow older, your risk for glioblastoma grows. But this new use for a tetanus shot means your chances of surviving this disease are growing, too.
I haven’t had a tetanus shot in years, and I don’t plan to get one. The disease is so rare it’s not worth worrying about. But I believe I WOULD get a tetanus shot if I had glioblastoma brain cancer and was planning to received immunotherapy.
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