There is a fascinating article in this morning’s Montreal Gazette reprinted from the Washington Post that claims that people with non-small-cell lung cancer and Melanoma and who had received the mRNA vaccine against Covid were living nearly twice as long as patients who had not been vaccinated. This was a report from the Universities of Texas and Florida and purely observational based on retrospective study of records. They will now study it or purpose.They conjectured that somehow the RNA vaccine ramps up the immune system. Stay tuned.
https://www.science.org/content/article/surprise-bonus-covid-19-vaccines-bolstering-cancer-treatment
People with cancer who coincidentally received the mRNA shots before starting drugs designed to unleash the immune system against tumors lived significantly longer than those who didn’t get vaccinated, a research team announced yesterday at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Berlin. Laboratory experiments by the group suggest the vaccines rev up the immune system, making even stubborn tumors more susceptible to treatment.
The findings underscore the still-untapped potential of mRNA technology at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration has backed away from funding the area. “I think this data is extraordinary,” says Ryan Sullivan, an oncologist and immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who wasn’t involved in the new research. Although the analysis of cancer patient data was retrospective, he notes that the observed association between COVID-19 vaccination and improved survival “is very strong.”
Stranger
IANA immunologist but it strikes me as obvious that if you take an entire population of any kind of people, divide them into two groups, and then vaccinate one group against Covid, the vaccinated group will get fewer cases of Covid, and therefore live longer than the unvaccinated group.
Yeah, that’d be the first obvious cause I’d look at.
The second is that people who take care of their health in some ways usually also take care of it in others. Are the vaccinated patients following their doctors’ directions better on taking their cancer drugs, getting more exercise, avoiding quack treatments, etc.?
So, if you read the Science News article linked above, it addresses this:
To find out, Grippin and colleagues analyzed the records of more than 1000 patients who were treated for advanced skin and lung cancer at MD Anderson between 2019 and ’23. People who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors lived significantly longer than those who received the same drugs but didn’t get the vaccine. For patients with advanced lung cancer, the median survival rate nearly doubled, rising from 20.6 months to 37.3.
Grippin says he and his colleagues “utilized as many statistical approaches as we could” to account for potential confounding factors, but the association between improved survival rates and COVID-19 vaccines persisted. Patients who received non-mRNA vaccines for influenza and pneumonia, for example, didn’t do better than the average immunotherapy patient.
The statement doesn’t explicitly address this but obviously someone in the study who died of causes pertaining to SARS-CoV-2 infection (the virus that causes COVID-19 due to not being vaccinated would be rejected as a “cofounding factor”.
The article also presents a hypothesis:
The vaccines, which consist primarily of mRNA encoding the spike protein on the surface of the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, are designed to prompt an immune response specific to the pathogen. But based on lab studies, Grippen and his colleagues think that in cancer patients, the mRNA vaccine acts “like a siren.” It triggers the release of immune signaling proteins known as cytokines, including type 1 interferon—the same protein responsible for many of the strong side effects people experience after getting immunized. The lab data suggest interferon, in turn, activates immune cells inside tumors and causes them to move into the lymph nodes, where they train other immune cells to travel back through the bloodstream and attack the tumors.
Tumors normally respond to this assault by expressing a protein called PD-L1, which is designed to suppress the immune system. But checkpoint inhibitors block immune cells from binding to these proteins. That thwarts the tumor’s attempts at evasion and helps “unleash the power of the immune system to kill cancer,” Grippin says.
Stranger
Suddenly I don’t mind so much the very, very strong side effects I suffer from getting these vaccinations.
Reported because the title is confusing (it’s not the cancers that are living longer!). Thanks for the link to the study - very interesting.