After the decades-long embargo the United States had put on Cuba was lifted a few months back and relations between the two countries normalize for the first time since the fifties, it has come out that it won’t only be rum and cigars entering the US legally now, but also a Cuba lung cancer vaccine that has saved millions in the country.
Considering the fact that the country run by the Castro family is the biggest and most important exporter of cigars in the world, the possibility of a Cuba lung cancer vaccine sounds more than a little eyebrow-raising; however, this drug was developed over the course of decades and it’s now making its way into the US.
According to Wired, the Cuba lung cancer vaccine, called Cimavax, was the product of 25 years’ worth of investigation in the country’s Center for Molecular Immunology, one of the “most inventive biotech and medical research” facilities in the world.
The country’s Minister of Health made the Cuba lung cancer vaccine available to the Cuban people for free back in 2011, and it has been reported that each shot of the drug costs the country about $1.
BGR reports that the Cuba lung cancer vaccine can actually prolong the life of patients with this cancer by four to six months when being compared to those that haven’t been exposed to the drug.
According to Pop Sci, the way the vaccine works is targeting a protein called epidermal growth factor, which is generated by cancer cells to signal others to grow out of control; in fact, the drug doesn’t target the actual tumor, but it can make the development of fast-growing cancers more manageable to doctors during treatment in the late stages of the disease.
Since its release, researchers in Japan and a few European countries have started to test Cimavax, but the embargo means that the US was a few steps away, until now, as Roswell Park Cancer Institute has finalized a deal with the Cuban government to further test the drug in the United States to see its potential as a real preventive vaccine instead of a treatment during the course of cancer.
It seems like the Cuba lung cancer vaccine is only one in a string of inventive cancer developments in the country that the US is only now able to work along in.
