Michael and Patricia Lawman are a husband and wife who have spent years trying to make a vaccine that can treat multiple forms of cancer without any side effects. Now, their hard work has paid off, as the vaccine they created is currently being tested on humans.

Instead of developing preventative vaccine that would protect the human body against quickly-mutating cancer cells, Michael and Patricia combined gene and cell therapy to develop a “therapeutic” vaccine. Modern immunotherapy treatments like CAR-T cell therapy typically reprogram a patient’s own cells to recognize and attack a specific kind of cancer cell, but the immune system is not always able to catch every cancer cell. In contrast, the Lawmans’ “ImmuneFx” therapeutic vaccine is injected directly into a tumor so that the cancer cells are forced to present a specific bacterial antigen on their surface that makes them easily identifiable to the immune system.

“We put this gene into a patient’s tumor cells and because there is a proprietary sequence within this protein, it is actually expressed on the surface of the tumor cell where it acts like a big red flag to the immune system,” Patricia explained.

The couple first started their research back in 1995, when they left the Walt Disney Memorial Cancer Institute in order to launch their Tampa-based company Morphogenesis. Since then, Michael and Patricia have worked with veterinary partners to test the vaccine on naturally-occurring cancers in 430 cats, dogs, and horses. Their tests concluded that the vaccine was both safe and effective in reducing the amount of tumors in 77% of the horses tested.

Back in November, Morphogenesis teamed up with the Moffitt Cancer Center in order to conduct clinical trials on six human patients who suffered from three and stage four melanoma. However, the Lawmans are confident that the vaccine could work on any form of cancerous tumor.

Find out more in the video below.