Vaccines have been trialled, there is still quite a way to go yet, probably before a truly effective vaccine is available for that. A new exciting area has been the development of what are called pneumococcal vaccines, which need to be modified in a very special way, so they re effective in children under the age of two years. And that might prevent again a very important cause in pneumonia in children and have the same effect in preventing it later on in life when it becomes important in the elderly. It s cancer. Nearly all of us know someone who died from it, many of us know someone fighting it now.
Researchers have long dreamt of developing vaccines against it, so far without success.
But there is hope for one form of the disease, cervical cancer. Martin Kast is Director of the Cancer Immunology Program at Loyola University in Chicago. One of the main causes of cervical cancer is the fact that people get infected with a virus which is called human papilloma virus. Professor Kast is working on something called a therapeutic vaccine. Vaccines as we know them work by priming the immune system before infection.