Tetanus shot may aid cancer treatment

Can a tetanus shot help treat brain cancer? A small study hints that it might.

A dose of tetanus vaccine let patients live longer when added to an experimental treatment for the most common and deadly kind of brain tumor, researchers report.

It “put the immune system on high alert,” paving the way for the experimental treatment to work better in attacking the disease, said researcher Kristen Batich of the Duke University Medical Center.

In a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature, she and others describe a study of 12 patients. Some who got the tetanus shot lived years longer than those who didn’t.

Read more from the New York Times.