By: Kevin Lee

There are a lot of cures for diseases out there. Some diseases end up cured on their own. However, there are a few oddballs, such as cancer, which have no universal solution.

When they have cancer, a person’s cells grow uncontrollably, which isn’t good for you. There aren’t many ways to treat cancer. Most of them are quite expensive and sometimes are not as effective as it should be for everyone. This is because cancer relies on your own cells, and everyone has their own unique cells. However, that might all change.

Dr. Catherine Wu and her team at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts are testing ways to make custom vaccines to treat cancer. Yes, custom vaccines. Vaccines that can treat your own unique cells, hence, are more effective than chemotherapy, which is another way to treat cancer, but chemotherapy is also much more expensive.

These vaccines were put to the test in 2015, where Dr. Wu and her team gathered six people who were suffering from skin cancer. The team created personalized vaccines that had the patients’ “unique proteins.” The vaccines were supposed to train the patients’ immune system to fight the threat of cancer, while sparing the good cells.

Two years later, four patients were seen to have no cancer recurrence. The two other patients with the most advanced skin cancer would later also have no growth of cancer after “four more doses of the customized vaccines.” Four more years later and all six patients were deemed with no cancer.

Although it’s not perfect, it is proven that these personalized vaccines can fight and win against cancer effectively. This will mark the beginning of the endeavor to treat cancer.