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This is Science Friday.

I'm Flora Lichten.

Today on the podcast, fighting a hard-to-treat cancer with a vaccine.

This is exciting because we can teach the immune system to recognize other deadly cancers.

A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering is developing a new vaccine for pancreatic cancer,

which is notoriously difficult to treat. 90% of people who are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer die from the

disease, which is what makes a new possible treatment so potentially exciting. A few years ago,

the team embarked on a small trial to test the vaccine's safety. 16 patients with pancreatic cancer got it,

and even though it was a small study, the results were promising.

Half the participants saw an immune response, and in those patients, the cancer hadn't relapsed

after 18 months. This week, the team released a new study in nature following those same patients

and found that most of them who responded to the vaccine in the first study had no recurrence, now about

three years later. Joining me to talk about these results and what they could mean generally for

the future of cancer treatment is Dr. Vinod Balachandran, Associate attending surgeon, and director

of the Olayin Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering, based in New York City.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having me, Flora.

So why is it so difficult to treat?

So this is an interesting question, and you might think it quite simple to answer, but...

No, I never think it's simple when I ask a science question.

Well, it is deceptively simple, but notoriously still hard for us to answer this.

...