affected children into wards where they awaited their fate.
Then in 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk created an injectable preparation of non-viable polio virus, a vaccine that would change the course of the disease forever. This inactivated polio vaccine was made by reproducing polio virus in the kidney of a monkey, killing the virus with formaldehyde, then injecting it into healthy patients to stimulate the production of antibodies.
As recently as 1988, polio caused paralysis in 350,000 children per year globally. A concerted global vaccination effort has reduced polio cases by 99 %, with Canada being polio-free since 1994.
Today, cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women globally, with low and moderate income nations being disproportionately affected. Human papillomavirus( HPV) is now understood to be the primary, near-universal cause of cervical cancer.
In a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2024, researchers reviewed the results of Scotland’ s HPV immunization program, which began in 2008. The study showed that, since the program was introduced, no cases of invasive cervical cancer have been detected in women who were fully vaccinated at age 12 – 13.
In Canada, the rate of this aggressive cancer is once again on the rise after having decreased for a number of decades, resulting from a combination of sub-optimal immunization rates, decreased participation in screening, and gaps in follow-up care. A vaccination rate of 90 per cent( both boys and girls) is needed to effectively eliminate HPV in Canada.
The future shift to mRNA vaccine technology has the potential to treat several cancers in addition to common diseases. While traditional vaccines use a version of the actual pathogen to stimulate the immune system, mRNA vaccines teach the body to make a small portion of the pathogen, such as the spike protein. The process of making the mRNA vaccine is much faster than traditional inactivated vaccines and can be adapted to any number of diseases. In fact, mRNA vaccines also cause a non-specific response that can boost the immune system overall.
Last fall, the journal Nature published a study that demonstrated that non-small cell lung cancer patients who had received a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine within one hundred days of cancer treatment with ICI( immune checkpoint inhibitors) had better median( 37.3 months versus 20.6 months) and threeyear survival rates( 55.7 per cent versus 30.8 per cent) than those who had not received a vaccine within a hundred days. Chemoimmunotherapy with ICI is used to treat a number of different cancers, including lung, breast, gastrointestinal, and cervical.
Meanwhile, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have created a personalized mRNA vaccine that helps the immune system fight pancreatic cancer. The vaccine can be uniquely designed for each patient based on their tumour’ s genetic mutations, training the body’ s immune cells to recognize and attack cancer cells.
Oncologists now have a new mode of treatment for cancers known to be resistant to therapy with low survival rates. The future of immunology is exciting, dynamic, and ever-changing.
2000s
Annual influenza immunization becomes standard practice across Canada
2020
COVID-19 vaccine introduced
2025
Canada loses elimination status for measles
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1998
Measles considered eliminated in Canada
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2006
HPV vaccine approved for use in Canada
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2008
Shingles vaccine introduced
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2023
Respiratory syncytial virus( RSV) vaccine approved for older adults
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SPRING 2026 | 25 |