We Can Stop Cancer Returning-Improve Your English Ep 750

Tune into our latest podcast to #LearnEnglish while learning about an amazing cancer treatment. #MedicalVocabulary #PositiveNews

Why Choose This Lesson?

• 🎧 Listening Practice: Real-world English listening practice.
• 🗣️ Improve Conversation: Enhance your English speaking skills.
• 🌍 Stay Informed: Keep up with groundbreaking cancer treatments and NHS trials.
• 📚 Vocabulary: Learn essential medical terms.

• Spontaneously: Happening by itself without being planned.
• Trialled: Tested to see how well something works.
• Surgery: Medical operation to remove or fix something inside the body.
• Anaesthetic: Drug that makes you unable to feel pain.
• Radiotherapy: Treatment using radiation to target and kill cancer cells.
• Chemotherapy: Treatment using chemicals to kill cancer cells.
• Likelihood: The chance that something will happen.
• Screening: Checking for disease before there are any symptoms.
• mRNA: A type of molecule used in vaccines to help the body recognize and fight diseases.
• Immune System: The body’s defence system against diseases.

So back to the trial for the cancer vaccine. Who is this for? Well, when people have cancer, the first treatment is usually surgery. ‘Surgery’, SURGERY typically means that the cancer is removed in an operation. And the person who does such an operation is called a ‘surgeon’, SURGEON. And the patient, the person with the cancer is unconscious, not aware and ‘under anaesthetic’, that’s ANAESTHETIC. ‘Anaesthetic’ usually means you can’t feel anything. And if it’s what we call a ‘general anaesthetic’, it means that we’re unconscious, we’re not awake either.

So once the cancer is removed in surgery, other treatments may follow, depending upon the level of risk the patient has. Some people have radiotherapy alone. That is a treatment where radiation is used to target particular areas of the body, where it is thought that cancer cells – little bits of cancer – may remain. And some people also have treatment called in English ‘chemotherapy’, that’s CHEMOTHERAPY, which basically means chemicals which kill cancer cells are fed into the body. The problem is that those chemicals in chemotherapy and the radiation in radiotherapy also affect the healthy parts of the body too. And people usually find chemotherapy a very difficult treatment.

After all of that, cancer patients may also be given drugs. Usually these are in the form of tablets or medication, which patients then take to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back. And much of the time, this works well and the patient remains healthy and the cancer doesn’t return. But what is difficult here – it’s not clear which patients will have the cancer come back and which won’t. Patients are given a % likelihood for whether their cancer may return. There may be some limited screening test and the risk reduces with time, but the patients themselves have to live with that risk, which may be long-term.

What this new vaccine promises to do – is nothing short of miraculous. Potentially anyway – it is only just being tested. The vaccine is mRNA technology and developed by BioNTech, so the same mRNA technology as used in the COVID vaccine. Making vaccines is much quicker and easier with this mRNA method of production. And what else is different about this vaccine? Well, genetic tests are performed on the cancer that’s been removed and then the vaccine is tailored, customised, designed specifically for these genetic changes in a particular patient’s cancer. This means that when the vaccine is introduced into the body, it puts protein cells into the body, which the patient’s immune system can see and which look just like the cancer. Your ‘immune system’, IMMUNE – that is the body’s defence system against disease – and the immune system is a wonderful thing. The problem with cancer cells can be that the patient’s immune system doesn’t always see them, it doesn’t recognise them.

So the brilliant part with this vaccine is that the patient’s immune system is able to see the protein cells that have been introduced by the vaccine. And because the proteins have been produced to be genetically similar to the patient’s own cancer, this teaches their immune system to also look for similar cells. It’s as though it’s teaching the immune system specifically what type of cells to look for and destroy. People sometimes say – there are lots of times when our bodies contain cancer cells, but they don’t come to anything because the immune system sees them destroys them. Cancers only become a problem, when the immune system doesn’t properly recognise them and doesn’t attack. But this vaccine causes the patient’s body to ‘see’ any remaining cancer cells and destroy them. And the immune system is super efficient at doing this, when it’s working properly and it knows what to look for. That’s the way any vaccine works, but instead of this vaccine being against a disease, it’s against the patient’s own cancer cells. How clever is that?

So what this may mean in the future? Anyone getting cancer, who has surgery to remove it, may not then face other treatments to prevent the cancer from returning. Treatments like radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which are really difficult and which do damage to the body. Imagine if people only needed to have a series of vaccinations instead. And that their long-term risk of cancer returning was dramatically reduced. That would be brilliant news for so many people around the world. And maybe for you and me in the future too.

Science can be marvellous sometimes, can’t it? Let us know what you think.