Personalized vaccines that steer the immune system to fight unique cancer cells show promise, but another powerful way to treat cancer might be hiding in plain sight.

People being treated for advanced skin and lung cancer lived longer if they had received a Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, according to new research published in the journal Nature. Both vaccines work using mRNA, which prompts cells to make a virus-like protein that triggers a useful immune response and teaches the body how to protect itself.

When a team working to develop personalized mRNA cancer vaccines found that those vaccines were mostly effective due to the broad immune response they prompted—not their custom-built nature—they decided to see how well widely available mRNA vaccines worked at the same task.

The te

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