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A hand-held device that delivers a ‘turbo-charged’ vaccine into muscles is being used to treat cancer. The device fires a skin cancer vaccine into the arm or leg, using electricity to boost the treatment’s potency 100-fold.
It’s being tested for its effectiveness against the most serious form of skin cancer in patients at four UK hospitals.
But the British researchers who developed it say it could potentially help with a number of other cancers, including lung, throat, liver, stomach, prostate, ovarian and bladder.

The device treats cancer using a special vaccine. Traditional vaccines, such as those used to prevent infectious diseases, contain harmless versions of the disease-causing microbes — these harmless microbes stimulate the immune system to recognise invaders.
Researchers have employed the same technology for cancer treatments, in effect producing a vaccine to the disease. Instead of training the immune system to seek out viruses and bacteria, the vaccines prime it to find and destroy cancer cells.

Cancer cells carry specific antigens — proteins that sit on the outside of the cells and act as a flag or marker, giving away the cell’s identity.
Now, scientists have developed a vaccine to tackle malignant melanoma, an aggressive type of skin cancer that kills a growing number of Britons every year.
The vaccine, which is a liquid, is injected into the leg or arm. It contains the same DNA sequence as some of the antigens found on the outside of the cancer cells.
Once injected into the body, it sparks a reaction in the immune system, priming it to see the antigens as an invader. It then seeks out cancer cells and destroys them.
The vaccine was developed by Nottingham-based company Scancell, which is run by Lindy Durrant, professor of cancer immunotherapy at Nottingham University.
The company has also developed a new way of delivering the drug. The delivery system is a small hand-held device that contains a syringe needle and four electrodes.
This device is held against the patient’s upper arm or leg — while the needle contains the vaccine itself, a brief electrical pulse from the electrodes creates an opening which allows the DNA to  enter cells.
If the electricity was not used, the DNA would float around the outside of cells and would take longer to trigger the immune system.
But when injected into cells it immediately triggers alarm signals around the body, and immune cells are recruited to the site of the injection.
This reduces the amount of time it takes to prime the system and dispatch immune cells to kill the cancer cells.
Clinical trials are under way on 22 patients at The Christie Hospital in Manchester, Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, the City Hospital in Nottingham and the Institute of Oncology, Leeds, where patients with melanoma are being given five injections over a five-month period.
Dr Julie Sharp, senior science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: ‘This approach is in the early stages of testing to find out if it is safe and if patients will respond to treatment. It will be several years before we know if it has potential to be used more widely.
‘Many scientists, including our researchers, are investigating the use of treatment vaccines designed to help the body’s own immune system help fight off cancer.’