Everyone could get anti-cancer jab from doctor within a decade, experts claim

EXCLUSIVE: Clinical trials on a vaccine to prevent lung cancer start soon and work is already underway to produce others that will halt breast, ovarian and bowel cancers

Folk could get a jab that stops them getting cancer within the next 10 years, Brit boffins claim. Clinical trials on a vaccine to prevent lung cancer will start next year.

Work is already underway to produce others that will halt breast, ovarian and bowel cancers before they develop inside the body.

Brit scientists then plan to combine the vaccines in one simple anti-cancer jab young folks could get free on the NHS via a trip to their GP.

The vaccine could save the lives of up to 3.6 million people worldwide who die from the deadliest strains of cancer every year – and lengthen the average human lifespan.

It would also free up funds to tackle other killer conditions such as dementia and heart disease. The astonishing breakthrough is being pioneered by medical researchers at the University of Oxford.

It has the backing of the NHS, Cancer Research UK, the Spanish-based CRIS Cancer Foundation and pharmaceutical giants.

Clinician-scientist Sarah Blagden, professor of experimental oncology at the University of Oxford, revealed the staggering progress in the fight for a jab in the Channel 4 documentary series Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures.

But in an exclusive interview with the Daily Star she revealed how the project could be a life-saving game-changer within a decade.

She said she foresaw how most major cancers could be halted by a single vaccine – similar to shots folks get to prevent measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and tetanus. The medic had the idea while listening to a podcast in her car.

In it Professor Charles Swanton, deputy clinical director at biomedical research centre The Francis Crick Institute in London, told how his staff were studying how cancers evolve in the body and become resistant to treatment.

Sarah, 56, said in a lightbulb moment she realised medics may be better focussed on researching how to stop cancer developing rather than treating it as a full blown disease.

Three years on – using fast-track vaccine development skills honed during the pandemic – her team is on the brink of rolling out an anti-lung cancer jab to the world.

She told the Daily Star: “What we think we have is the first vaccine that could actually prevent cancer from starting in the first place. Even lung cancer takes probably a decade plus to develop in your lungs. So there’s this thing called pre-cancer – it’s the form that cancer goes through before it becomes proper cancer.

“That is your cells are already undergoing this transition towards cancer. What we’ve done is design a vaccine to get your immune system to eradicate those cells.

“I heard Charlie actually talking about it on a podcast. And I contacted him and said, ‘Charlie, you should design a vaccine against those early changes’. Coming from Oxford we’ve got all these vaccine groups coming out of the pandemic.

“We thought we can use the backbone of the vaccines that we’ve been working on and we can actually repurpose them to design them against cancer rather than Covid.

“He got back to me and said, ‘okay, I’ll put you in touch with my team’. And that’s how it started.

“Everybody’s got ideas – they’re cheap. But it has been quite painful to get it off the ground because we had to convince people that this was a good idea. It took me three attempts to get funding for it because it’s a bit out of the box.

“But we’ve got the first batch of the vaccine made in Oxford and we’re going to open the clinical trial in the summer next year. We’re working on a number of different vaccines now preventing lots of different cancers.

“What we’d like to do is pool them all into one vaccine that you give to the population – to your kids. Their cancer risk would go right down. That would be the plan. We’d like to imagine that we could do this within the next decade or maybe the next 20 years.”

Sarah said her team’s work was triggering a seismic shift in the way medics try to tackle cancer.

“Oncologists like myself, we’re very fixed on treating established cancer,” she said. “We’re not looking underneath the iceberg at the moment. But this is an opportunity to actually go in with something to prevent it.

“In the world no-one else is doing it like this. There are other people doing early work on vaccines but we’re working in a much more coordinated, faster way and we’re working across multiple disease areas.

“So if we have five or six different vaccines we would then want to try and make one out of the best parts of those and we would want to give it to people in early adulthood.

“It’s going to be possible for the university to develop a vaccine that’s going to be useful across the world. I know I sound like I’m going mad here but, you know, if it’s good… I don’t want to stop.

“I don’t want to have a long gap between us developing the lung cancer one to, say, the breast one. I want us to keep moving fast, fast, fast.

“We’re very lucky at the moment. We’ve got really amazing scientists, we’ve got really cool technologies, we’ve got patients supporting us, we’ve got an infrastructure and funders that agree with us.

“I think this is kind of a one-in-a-generation opportunity to do this.

“So we just need to do it quickly and not waste any time.”

Sarah said her team was focussed on proving the vaccines were safe and achieved their goals – a process which had sped up due to COVID.

“I never really kind of wanted to sort of verbalise it because I thought everyone would think I was crazy,” she said. “But in my dream I would like you to get vaccinated at a certain age and it protects you.

“And I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to do that. This comes from a good place. This comes from, you know, we’ve all got family members with cancer, we’ve all got our own experiences of how rotten cancer is, what a horrible disease it is.

“And so this comes from us wanting to try and get rid of this disease.

“We’re not in the hands of Big Pharma, it’s come from our minds, it’s come from our desire to make a difference, to make an impact.

“I couldn’t do this on my own. But I think we all feel that this is kind of really important. A lot of the scientists that have got involved are committing more and more of their days to doing this work because we all think, ‘wow, this actually could be a big game changer’.

“We’ve seen already from the experiments that we’ve done – let’s just say that they look really, really promising. The data that’s come through looks like it potentially could work. My message to cancer is, ‘we’re coming for you’.”

• Cancer Detectives: Finding the Cures is available on Channel 4 streaming, in partnership with Cancer Research UK.