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Hello. This is 6 Minute English
from BBC Learning English.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Beth. In our lifetime,
one in five 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
or c. 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.
There'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.
Dr McKean says
that a number of studies
have demonstrated how cancer spreads.
She uses the phrase 'a number
of' to mean several,
but it also makes her statement
more convincing because,
of course, several studies are better
than just one.
Cancer cells switch off
the immune system
by pretending to be healthy cells.
It's like they're saying 'nothing
to see here',
an informal phrase which can be used
to encourage people to move
or look away from something, either in a
playful way or to cover something up.
For example, a police officer at a crime
scene might say 'nothing to see here',
to move people on.
So, in other words,
cancer hijacks healthy cells.
It takes control of something
which doesn't belong to it
and uses it for its own advantage.
So, how would a vaccine change things?
Well, existing treatments
like chemotherapy
aggressively target the cancer,
but also attack healthy tissue,
creating unpleasant side effects.
New breakthrough vaccines,
on the other hand, retrain the immune
system to recognise cancer cells
and eliminate those,
and only those, naturally,
even in patients
with the disease already.
Here's Professor Eduardo Sanchez of
the Anderson Cancer Center in Texas,
explaining more
to BBC World Service's, The Inquiry.
Basically, the cancer cells are telling
the immune system, 'Don't attack me,
don't eat me', right?
The immune system has forgotten how to
go about recognising those cancer cells,
becoming blind to recognise those
aberrations that cancer cells generate,
and what we want to do with vaccines
is to re-educate the immune system.
In cancer patients, the immune system
is blind to cancerous growths.
It completely fails to notice them
or be aware of their danger,
so the vaccine re-educates
the immune system,
or teaches it to behave,
in a different way.
To recap, some cancer treatments work by
unblocking our blocked natural defences,
whereas vaccines retrain
the immune system to find
and attack cancer cells naturally.
Because these two approaches are
quite different,
they can be used together
and individually.
So to answer my original question,
Neil, a vaccine for cancer
might not be too far away.
But how about your question?
Isn't it time
you revealed the answer?
I asked which disease was first
successfully treated by a vaccine?
And I said polio.
Was I right?
You were wrong,
I'm afraid. The correct option was C,
which is smallpox.
OK, let's recap the vocabulary
we've learned in this programme,
starting with 'breakthrough', a sudden,
dramatic and important discovery.
'A number of' something
means several or many
and can add credibility
to what you say.
The phrase 'nothing to see here'
is used to discourage people
from paying attention
or looking too closely at something,
or to move them away.
If you 'hijack' something, you use
something that doesn't belong to you
for your own benefit.
Being 'blind to' something
means failing to notice it
or recognise it as a threat.
And finally, to 're-educate' means
to teach somebody to think
or behave in a new or different way.
Once again, our six minutes are up,
but if you're hungry for more,
head over to our website,
bbclearningenglish.com,
where you can find a worksheet for
this programme and it has a quiz in it.
Good luck and
we'll see you again soon.
Bye for now.
Goodbye!
Vocabulary
Word 1 of 15tumour
word
0:18
"an abnormal mass of cells that grows in the body"
More Listening Practice
About this lesson
Learn about the latest breakthroughs in cancer vaccine research and what they could mean for the future of medicine in this 6 Minute English episode.