MONDAY, Nov. 9, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Injecting an ordinary flu vaccine straight into skin cancer tumors may help rally the immune system against the cancer, a small early trial suggests.
Doctors at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center treated 18 patients who had melanoma that could be removed with surgery, The Washington Post reported.
The trial was small and didn’t include a comparison group, so it can’t prove the approach works. But it hints at a cheap, ready-made option at a time when many cancer vaccines are custom-built for each patient, The Post noted.
Patients first got a standard flu vaccine shot in the arm. A couple of days later, and then 12 days after that, their melanoma tumors were directly injected with that same flu vaccine. For most patients, the tumor injection was about triple the dose of a standard flu shot. No serious side effects emerged.
Two weeks later, surgeons removed the tumors. Most tissue samples were packed with immune cells, and blood tests showed signs that the immune system had switched on.
By surgery, tumors in seven patients showed signs of shrinking. Three patients had no cancer cells left at all.
“A pretty striking pattern emerged,” said Dr. Ian Garbarine, a surgery resident at Ohio State who presented the findings Friday at a cancer immunotherapy meeting in Phoenix.
The flu vaccine doesn’t teach the body to recognize cancer. Instead, it stirs up trouble inside the tumor.
Many cancers survive by sending out signals that keep immune cells away. The vaccine breaks that calm, drawing in immune cells that collect bits of the dying tumor and point the body’s defenses at it.
Garbarine suspects the shot could work even better alongside checkpoint inhibitors such as Keytruda and Opdivo, drugs that help the immune system fight cancer. His team is now testing that pairing in patients whose melanoma has spread and can’t be removed surgically, The Post reported.
Marcin Kortylewski, a cancer immunologist at City of Hope in California who wasn’t involved in the trial, said he liked the idea and that the procedure is simple and well tolerated.
Still, similar immune-boosting treatments have looked promising early on only to fail in later testing, he noted. And the method would only work on tumors a needle can reach.
“This is early-stage, and it requires accessible lesions for local delivery,” Kortylewski said.
Other teams are testing the idea, too. At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, oncologist Dr. Karam Khaddour is trying it on squamous cell carcinoma, a skin cancer usually cured by surgery. He hopes the shot leaves behind immune defenses that catch any cancer cells surgery misses.
“It’s exciting,” said Dr. Catherine Wu, an oncologist and cancer vaccine researcher at Dana-Farber. A flu vaccine, she added, can “give the immune system a kick in the pants.”
Research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
More information
The National Cancer Institute has more on melanoma treatment.
SOURCE: The Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2026
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