Hey Science Quickly listeners, Rachel here.
I just wanted to give you a heads up that I'll be taking a short break from hosting the pod to go on parental leave.
But don't worry, I'm leaving you in excellent hands.
Award-winning journalist Kendra Pierre Lewis is stepping into host science quickly while I'm gone.
You might recognize her from the late Gimlet Media podcast, How to Save a Planet,
or from her work at Bloomberg, The New York Times, Popular Science, and lots of other outlets.
She's taking the helm starting in November,
and I'll be coming back into your feed sometime in the spring of 2026.
So, see you next year, and as always, thanks for listening.
It's a diagnosis that most of us have learned to fear.
On the one hand, decades of medical advancements have increased treatment and survival rates.
A number of people who in the past might have died from cancer now go on to live long,
full lives without recurrence.
But not everyone is so lucky.
For certain kinds of cancers,
including cancer of the pancreas, effective treatments largely remain elusive.
So increasingly, researchers are looking to perhaps an unexpected tool for help.
Vaccines.
It turns out that before mRNA vaccines became a key tool to protect people against COVID-19,
researchers were initially eyeing them as a way to target cancer.