#cancer-vaccine

#cancer-vaccine

A virus that sickens marine mammals has been detected in Arctic waters for the first time. Scientists used drones armed with petri dishes to collect samples of blow - the air and mucus whales expel from their blowholes - from whales in northern Norway. The team identified cetacean morbillivirus in samples from humpback whales ( Megaptera novaeangliae) and one sperm whale ( Physeter macrocephalus), though the humpbacks showed no symptoms of disease.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, the shot works by encasing adjuvants, which substances that increase or modulate the immune response to a vaccine, and melanoma peptide antigens, short amino acid sequences that can be recognized by the body, inside specialized lipid nanoparticles. In one experiment, the team found that 80 percent of vaccinated mice that had been exposed to melanoma cells three weeks earlier remained tumor-free for 250 days, the full duration of the study.