Now, researchers have developed a nasal spray vaccine that can cancel out this resistance. The vaccine is able to activate and energize an immune cell called a CD8+ T-cell in the tissue at the tumor.

French researcher Eric Tartour led a team studying the effectiveness of the intranasal spray on solid mucosal tumors in mice. He says the tumors developed after the animals were infected with human papilloma virus -- a virus known to cause cancer.

“The tumor shrank. And we analyzed the tumors when they shrank. And they are heavily infiltrated by immune cells which destroyed the tumors.”

He and his team compared the effectiveness of their vaccine, both as a nasal spray and when it was injected. They found the vaccine worked better as a spray.

Eric Tartour works with the Universitie Paris Descarte. He and his team have been developing the intranasal vaccine for five years. He says their next goal is to see how well it works against tumors that have spread to other areas in the body.

A report on the anti-cancer spray was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

There is good news in the fight to save children from the most serious kind of malaria, known as cerebral malaria. Each year, cerebral malaria infects about 500 thousand young people in African countries south of the Sahara Desert. They get the disease after being bitten by a common insect, the mosquito.