How a tetanus shot could help treat a deadly brain cancer

The history of cancer research is one of inevitable hype and dashed hope. Though most people have been primed to believe in elusive ‘cures’, the most important news is usually about slowly strengthening imperfect treatments. Some of the most promising of these involve vaccines.

A study published recently in Nature, a top-tier journal, has demonstrated that a tetanus shot, when administered before an experimental vaccine therapy, can lengthen survival times for patients afflicted with glioblastoma multiforme, a dreadful brain cancer that is almost universally deadly.

Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina injected patients with a tetanus booster before administering a vaccine designed to target the brain tumour. Those who received the booster survived much longer than those treated with just the vaccine: half of the booster group ‘lived nearly five years or longer from their diagnosis’, said Dr John Sampson, chief of neurosurgery at Duke University Medical Centre and one of the study’s authors.