6 Minute English / A vaccine for cancer

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Beth. In our lifetime, 1 in 5 people will be affected by cancer, a disease where cells grow uncontrollably and cause tumours in the body. Tumours can be benign, meaning not cancerous, or malignant, meaning cancerous, and in 2022 there were an estimated 9.7 million deaths from malignant cancers worldwide. But in this programme, we ll be focusing on some good news instead.

Vaccines are medicine which protect the human body by making it immune from a certain disease. Now, there s been a sudden and important discovery a breakthrough - in the development of a new vaccine called mRNA.

So, could a vaccine for cancer soon become a reality? That s what we ll be finding out, as well as learning some useful new words and phrases. And remember, if you like listening to 6 Minute English and want to read along at the same time, you can find a transcript for the programme on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

Now I have a question for you, Beth. We ve mentioned some of the most recent vaccines, but which disease did the first successful vaccine treat? Was it:

a) flu?b) polio? orc) smallpox?

I m going to say polio.

OK! Well, we ll find out the correct answer at the end of the programme. You might wonder why the body s immune system doesn t fight cancer automatically. The reason is that cancer has clever ways of hiding from our natural defences, as Dr Meredith McKean, director of research at Tennessee Oncology, explained to BBC World Service programme, The Inquiry:

Dr Meredith McKeanThere's been a number of studies that have demonstrated the different techniques that the cancer has developed to be able to put up signals or proteins, essentially, on the surface of the cancer cells, to tell the immune system, Go away! There's nothing here to look at! And so it's actually been hijacking these receptors to essentially tell the immune system to kind of take the brakes off, and be more aggressive in fighting cancer. That's really allowed a breakthrough with immune therapy over the past decade.