This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato.

Today on the podcast, how MRNA vaccines help fight cancer.

We don't see that very often, you know.

This is big stuff.

And in fact, usually when you see this, you say, oh, this is too good to be true.

But you know what?

I think it's true, and we should take advantage of it even now.

Over the last five years, billions of people have received at least one dose of the COVID-MRNA vaccine.

These work by triggering an immune response in the body meant to fight COVID-19 infection.

Besides being effective against COVID, the vaccine appears to have an unanticipated result.

It seems to make cancer treatments more effective, and many vaccinated patients have lived longer than their

unvaccinated counterparts. This news comes at a time when the federal government is slashing

funding for MRNA research. Joining me to talk about this finding are my guests. Dr. Adam Grypen,

radiation oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center

in Houston, Texas, Dr. Eric Topold, cardiologist and genomics professor at the Scripps Research Institute

in La Jolla, California. Welcome both of you, the Science Friday. Thanks so much for having us.

Thanks, Sarah. You're welcome. Let me begin with

you, Dr. Griffin. Can you tell us exactly what you found in this study? Yeah, so we looked back at

over a thousand patients who were treated for cancer with immune therapies at MD Anderson.

And what we found was that those patients who happened to receive a COVID-MRNA vaccine around the time they received their immune therapy

lives significantly longer than patients who did not receive the COVID vaccine.

...