A vaccine for cancer

6 Minute English

BBC

Language Learning, Education

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

There's been a breakthrough in cancer research! Hear all about it and learn some vocabulary with Neil and Beth.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	6 Minute English from BBC LearningEnglish.com.
0:07.3	Hello, this is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil.
0:11.9	And I'm Beth. In our lifetime, one in five people will be affected by cancer,
0:17.6	a disease where cells grow uncontrollably and cause tumours in the body. Tumours can be benign, meaning cancer, a disease where cells grow uncontrollably and cause tumours in the body.
0:22.9	Tumas can be benign, meaning not cancerous, or malignant, meaning cancerous.
0:28.7	And in 2022, there were an estimated 9.7 million deaths from malignant cancers worldwide.
0:37.1	But in this program, we'll be focusing on some good news instead.
0:41.3	Vaccines are medicine which protect the human body by making it immune from a certain disease.
0:46.9	Now there's been a sudden and important discovery, a breakthrough, in the development of a new
0:52.3	vaccine called MRNA.
0:54.7	So could a vaccine for cancer soon become a reality?
0:58.7	That's what we'll be finding out as well as learning some useful new words and phrases.
1:04.3	And remember, if you like listening to Six-Minute English
1:07.5	and want to read along at the same time, you can find a transcript for the
1:12.0	programme on our website, BBClearningEnglish.com.
1:16.0	Now I have a question for you, Beth. We've mentioned some of the most recent vaccines,
1:21.2	but which disease did the first successful vaccine treat? Was it A, flu, B, polio or C, smallpox?
1:30.0	Oh, I'm going to say polio.
1:32.2	Okay, well, we'll find out the correct answer at the end of the program.
1:36.3	You might wonder why the body's immune system doesn't fight cancer automatically.
1:41.7	The reason is that cancer has clever ways of hiding from unnatural
1:45.4	defences, as Dr Meredith McKean, Director of Research at Tennessee Oncology, explained to BBC
	...

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