A Luso-Israeli medical team is celebrating a breakthrough in the treatment of the deadliest form of skin cancer: metastatic melanoma.
The scientists working out of Lisbon and Tel Aviv Universities have developed a vaccine that trains the immune system to react to cancer markers and destroy ‘just those cells’, avoiding adverse effects on health cells.
The results have been published in the latest issue of medical journal Nature Nanotechnology.
For now, the research has simply been on laboratory mice.
Next steps will be to apply for a patent and take the process forwards.
Up till now this form of cancer causes the death of one person every 52 minutes, according to data from tke Skin Cancer Foundation, while the number of diagnosed cases has been on the rise for the past three decades.
