America will soon start testing Cuba's cancer-fighting vaccine

America will soon start testing Cuba's cancer-fighting vaccine
(Image credit: iStock)

Thanks to normalizing relations between Cuba and the United States, America could get its hands on a promising lung cancer-fighting vaccine that has been available for free to the public in the island nation since 2011.

The vaccine, called Cimavax, doesn't attack tumors directly, Wired reports, and instead targets a tumor-produced protein that circulates in the blood. When that protein is produced, the body responds with a hormone called epidermal growth factor, which can cause cancer. By attacking the protein that spurs the release of epidermal growth factor, Cimavax aims to check the growth and spread of tumors — but doesn’t necessarily shrink them.

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Kimberly Alters

Kimberly Alters is the news editor at TheWeek.com. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.