Remember the heated debates about COVID vaccines and those “turbo cancer” conspiracy theories circulating all over social media? Okay, it’s a bit outdated now, but it was this false idea that mRNA vaccines would cause fulminating cancers…

Well, brace yourself, because some very serious researchers have just discovered EXACTLY the opposite. You'll see, it's funny!

Oncologists at the University of Texas and the University of Florida analyzed the records of more than 1,000 patients with advanced lung cancer or melanoma and noticed something odd: Patients who received an mRNA COVID vaccine within 100 days of starting their immunotherapy lived significantly longer than those who didn't . Like, twice as long.

Concretely, the median survival goes from 20 months without vaccine to 37 months with vaccine and after 3 years, 56% of vaccinated patients are still alive, compared to only 31% of unvaccinated patients.

So, how is this possible? Well, to understand, we need to take a quick detour through immunotherapy. Indeed, for the past ten years, we've been treating certain cancers with drugs that don't directly target the tumor but actually unblock the immune system.

The thing is, cancer cells are malignant (no pun intended) because they use a protein called PD-L1 to literally deactivate T cells, the famous soldiers of our immune system. Checkpoint inhibitors like pembrolizumab or nivolumab then prevent this deactivation and the immune system can finally do its job and attack the tumor.

Except it doesn't work on all cancers. There are what we call "hot" tumors and "cold" tumors. Hot tumors have been detected by the immune system and infiltrated by immune cells. Cold tumors, on the other hand, are invisible. No immune cells around, no reaction. And for these cold tumors, conventional immunotherapy is useless and it's a nightmare to fight.

For their part, mRNA COVID vaccines act like a fire alarm for the immune system. When you get your dose of Pfizer or Moderna, your body produces a tsunami of type I interferon. This is a signaling molecule that puts the entire immune system on high alert: Antigen-presenting cells wake up, T cells multiply, and everyone goes into fight mode!

And this widespread activation is not limited to the COVID virus, as the immune system takes advantage of it to scan EVERYTHING that is lying around, including cancer cells that had previously gone unnoticed. Cold tumors then become hot and begin to express PD-L1 in an attempt to protect themselves. And that's precisely when checkpoint inhibitors come into play and block this defense.

The researchers tested this on animal models to understand the exact mechanism and confirmed that the vaccine alone is not enough. A combination of mRNA vaccine and immunotherapy is required to achieve maximum effect. One awakens the immune system, the other maintains the active attack against the tumor.

The craziest thing about this story is that no one was looking for this effect. Elias Sayour, one of the lead researchers behind this discovery, had already been working on personalized anti-cancer mRNA vaccines since 2016 and had noticed that messenger RNA molecules could train the immune system even without targeting specific tumor antigens. But to imagine that COVID vaccines developed in a rush for a pandemic would have this power against cancer, no one had anticipated it.

Besides, there have been a few cases reported in the medical literature of patients whose tumors spontaneously regressed after a COVID vaccination and at the time, everyone thought it was anecdotal... maybe coincidences. But with this study involving more than 1,000 patients and controlling for 39 different variables (cancer stage, previous treatments, comorbidities, etc.), it's hard to talk about chance.

Five times more likely to be alive three years after diagnosis, just by adding a vaccine that we already have on hand and that has been administered to billions of people, that's not nothing.

Now, before you cry miracle, a few important clarifications. This study is observational, and it's not a randomized clinical trial. This means that the researchers analyzed existing data and did not randomly assign patients to one group or the other. So there could be hidden biases. For example, perhaps patients who chose to be vaccinated during their cancer treatment are also those who follow their care protocols better in general?

But the researchers anticipated this criticism and used advanced statistical techniques to eliminate as many confounding factors as possible, and even then, the signal remains strong. Strong enough, in any case, to justify moving on to the stage of a true prospective clinical trial.

The team is therefore launching a large-scale trial on lung cancer patients, with two groups: one receiving standard immunotherapy, the other receiving immunotherapy + mRNA COVID vaccine. If the results confirm what they observed, we could then see treatment protocols evolve very quickly.

And unlike personalized cancer vaccines, which require analyzing each patient's tumor to create a tailor-made vaccine (which is expensive and complex), COVID vaccines are already mass-produced, approved, available everywhere, and relatively inexpensive.

We knew that not only did these COVID vaccines not cause cancer , but discovering that they could also become a standard tool for TREATING cancer is super fun, I think... Science always has surprises in store for us, and that's why it fascinates me!