Which cancer appears to be prevented by a vaccine?

The vaccine protects against the human papillomavirus (HPV). If this virus stays in the body for a long time, it can cause some types of cancer. The FDA has approved HPV vaccines to prevent: Cervical, vaginal, and vulvar cancers. Vaccines (Shots) The HPV vaccine can prevent several kinds of cancer, and the hepatitis B vaccine can help prevent liver cancer.

Zhou, the great inventor of the vaccine, passed away in 1999 and was unable to see the benefits brought by the vaccine. Dr. Zhou was born in 1957 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. At the time of his birth, his father was already 50 years old and the birth of a boy brought the family hope and joy.

Cancer itself can’t be passed down from parents to children. And genetic changes in tumor cells can’t be passed down. But a genetic change that increases the risk of cancer can be passed down (inherited) if it is present in a parent’s egg or sperm cells.

These prophylactic vaccines have been successful because they circumvent three major challenges facing the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines: (1) low immunogenicity; (2) established disease burden; and (3) the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment.

Cancer is caused by certain changes to genes, the basic physical units of inheritance. Genes are arranged in long strands of tightly packed DNA called chromosomes. Cancer is a genetic disease—that is, it is caused by changes to genes that control the way our cells function, especially how they grow and divide.

Between 30-50% of all cancer cases are preventable. Prevention offers the most cost-effective long-term strategy for the control of cancer.

The difficulty in treating cancer is that it’s not a single disease, but rather a group of diseases. In total there are more than 100 different types of cancers. Cancers are also caused by different things, so no one strategy can prevent them.

Therapies. When Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered radiation at the end of the 19th century, they stumbled upon the first effective non-surgical cancer treatment. With radiation also came the first signs of multi-disciplinary approaches to cancer treatment.

The earliest cancerous growths in humans were found in Egyptian and Peruvian mummies dating back to ∼1500 BC. The oldest scientifically documented case of disseminated cancer was that of a 40- to 50-year-old Scythian king who lived in the steppes of Southern Siberia ∼2,700 years ago.

Several vaccines have been developed that can prevent HBV and HPV infection and, as a result, protect against the formation of HBV- and HPV-related cancers. Four of these preventive cancer vaccines have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Here’s the take-home point: a 1 millimeter cluster of cancerous cells typically contains somewhere in the ball park of a million cells, and on average, takes about six years to get to this size. Generally, a tumor can’t be detected until it reaches the 1 millimeter mark.

Featured Photo by Angiola Harry on Unsplash