BBC 6分钟英语 癌症疫苗

English

from BBC learning english com. Hello.

This is 6 min English from BBC Learning English.

I'm Neil and I'm Beth. In our lifetime, one in five people will be affected by cancer, a disease where cells grow uncontrollably and cause tumors in the body.

Tumors can be benign,

meaning not cancerous, or malignant, meaning cancerous.

And in 2022, they were an estimated 9.7 million deaths from malignant cancers worldwide.

But in this program, will be focusing on some good news.

Instead, vaccines are medicine, which protects the human body by making it immune from a certain disease.

Now, there's been a sudden and important discovery, a breakthrough in the development of a new vaccine called m RNA.

So could a vaccine for cancer soon become a reality?

That's what we'll be finding out, as well as learning some useful new words and phrases.

And remember, if you like listening to Six Minute English and want to read along at the same time, you can find a transcript for the program on our websites, BBC, learning English dot com.

Now, I have a question for you, beth.

We've mentioned some of the most recent vaccines, but which disease did the 1st successful vaccine treat?

Was it a flu, B, polio or C smallpox?

Oh, I'm going to say polio.

OK, well, we'll find out the correct answer at the end of the program.

You might wonder why the body's immune system doesn't fight cancer automatically.

The reason is that cancer has clever ways of hiding from unnatural defenses.

As Doctor Meredith mccain, director of research at Tennessee on Ecology, explained to BBC World Service program the inquiry, there's been a number of studies that have demonstrated the different techniques that the cancer has developed to be able to put up signals, or proteins, essentially on the surface of the cancer cells to tell the immune system go away.

There's nothing here to look at.

And so it's actually been hijacking these receptors to essentially tell the immune system to kind of take the breaks off and be more aggressive in fighting cancer.

That's really allowed a breakthrough with immune therapy over the past decade.

DR mccain says that a number of studies have demonstrated how cancer spreads.

She uses the phrase a number of to mean several.

But it also makes her statement more convincing, because, of course, several studies are better than just one.

Cancer cells switch off the immune system by pretending to be healthy cells.

It's like their saying, nothing to see.

Here an informal phrase which can be used to encourage people to move or look away from something, either in a playful way or to cover something up, e.g., a police officer at a crime scene might say Nothing to see here to move people on.

So in other words, cancer hijacks healthy cells.

It takes control of something which doesn't belong to it and uses it for its own advantage.

So how would a vaccine change things?

Wealth? Existing treatments, like chemotherapy, aggressively target the cancer, but also attack healthy tissue, creating unpleasant side effects.

New breakthrough vaccines, on the other hand, retrain the immune system to recognize cancer cells and eliminate those, and only those naturally, even in patience with the disease already.

His professor, eduardo Sanchez of the Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, explaining more to BBC World Services.

The inquiry Basically, the cancer cells are telling the immune system, don't attack me, dawn, eat me.

Right? The immune system has forgotten how to go about recognizing those cancer cells, becoming blind to recognize those averations that cancer cells generate.

And what we want to do with vaccines is to reedocate the immune system in cancer patients.

The immune system is blind to cancerous growths.

It completely fails to notice them or be aware of their danger.

So the vaccine reeducates the immune system, or teaches it to behave in a different way to recap.

Some cancer treatments work by unblocking our blocked natural defenses, whereas vaccines retrain the immune system to find and attack cancer cells naturally.

Because these two approaches are quite different, they can be used together and individually.

So to answer my original question, neil, a vaccine for cancer might not be too far away.

But how about your question? Isn't it time you revealed the answer?

I asked, which disease was 1st successfully treated by a vaccine?

And I said, polio? Was I right?

You were wrong. I'm afraid the correct option was See, which is smallpox.

OK, let's recap the vocabulary we've learned in this program, starting with

breakthrough, A sudden, dramatic and important discovery, A number of something means several or many, and can add credibility to what you say.

The phrase Nothing to see here is used to discourage people from paying attention or looking too closely at something, or to move them

away. If you hijack something, you use something that doesn't belong to you for your own benefits.

Being blind to something means failing to notice it or recognize it as a threat.

And finally, to reeducate means to teach somebody to think or behave in a new or different way.

Once again, our 6 min are up, but if you're hungry for more, head over to our website, bbc learning english dot com, where you can find a work sheet for this programme, and it has a quiz in it.

Good luck, and we'll see you again soon by an hour.

Good Bye. 6 min English from BBC learning english dot com.

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