The loco is a mollusk native to the Chilean coast, featured in stews and seafood feasts. No one could have imagined that it might also become a weapon against cancer.
A team of researchers in Chile took a protein extracted from this sea snail and used it to develop TRIMELVax, an experimental vaccine against metastatic melanoma. They tested it on 17 patients who no longer responded to standard immunotherapy—cases in which conventional medicine had exhausted its options.
The results surprised even the scientists themselves: the vaccine was safe, with no hospitalizations due to adverse effects, and approximately one-third of the patients managed to stabilize the disease. One of them, according to Reuters, showed regression of metastases in the lungs. It is still an early-stage trial, but it opens a door that no one had imagined knocking on with something as simple as a mollusk.
