Big Medical Advances To Come in the New Year

Medical advances in the new year could have a huge impact on world health.

Vaccines, new regulations and cheaper drugs are just some of the medical advances to come.

Like other vaccines, cancer vaccines use a chemical marker of a disease (in one case, a virus; in another, a malignant tumor) to train a person’s immune system to fight the disease.
But unlike vaccines for the flu or chicken pox, which are preventive, “we almost uniformly vaccinate after cancer is there,” Kwak said.
Some cancer vaccines in development could be administered to many people, while others – including Kwak’s vaccine for follicular lymphoma – would have to be tailored to each patient’s tumors.

There is a lot to look forward to and more choices will be one of the biggest drivers of change and improvement.

New studies reveal how prostate cancer spreads!

According to a new study from University of Michigan discover how prostate cancer cells spread to the bones. Science offers hope for the treatment of prostate cancer

So why does cancer recur? Say a person has a tumor and surgeons cut it out or do radiation, but it recurs in the bone marrow five years later, Taichman said. Those cancer cells had been circulating in the body well before the tumor was discovered, and one place those cancer cells hid is the niche.

“So what have the cancer cells been doing during those five years? Now we have a partial answer — they’ve been sitting in this place whose job it is to keep things from proliferating and growing,” Taichman said.

“Our work also provides an explanation as to why current chemotherapies often fail in that once cancer cells enter the niche, most likely they stop proliferating,” said Yusuke Shiozawa, lead author of the study. “The problem is that most of the drugs we use to try to treat cancer only work on cells that are proliferating.”

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