Administration of a common diabetes medication to mice appears to “considerably improve” the performance of an experimental anti-cancer vaccine, according to newly published research.

Yongwon Choi, one of the team behind the new study and a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, says the discovery is “potentially extremely important and could revolutionize current strategies for both therapeutic and protective vaccines” (press release).

In their paper in this week’s Nature the researchers take a slightly more measured line, saying this “surprising finding” could “have important implications for therapeutic and prophylactic vaccine development”.

As WebMD notes, the researchers weren’t even looking to do research on vaccine efficacy. (Although as an aside the ‘Diabetes Drug Makes Vaccines Work Better’ headline is a bit over the top.)

They were actually looking at ‘immunological memory’. What they found was that the burning of fatty acids by immune system T-cells is vital in laying down memory of nasty things they have encountered. This memory allows them to better fight these nasties next time they encounter them.

Obviously if you can improve the memory of, oh … say … a cancer vaccine, you could potentially make it a better vaccine. This is where the diabetes drug, metformin, which seems to boost this process, comes in.

“Essentially, I like to think of it as an immune system booster,” says another study author Russell Jones, of McGill University (CBC).

The key word here is clearly ‘potentially’ as the newly published study is only in mice and uses an experimental anti-cancer vaccine.

This shows up in an outbreak of usage of the word ‘may’ in the headlines, which generally focus on cancer and ignore the fact this might actually apply to all vaccines:

Diabetes drug may help fight cancer, mouse study suggests – CBC

Diabetes drug may help fight cancer – PA

Metformin may help make vaccines work better: study – Reuters