mRNA vaccines for cancer !

 Pancreatic cancer illustration via medicalgraphics.de

And now, mRNA vaccines for cancer


One of the marvels of the current pandemic was the speed of development, and stunning efficacy, of the mRNA vaccines. It was not a new technology, but reached practical maturity at a vital moment. There's a lot of research into mRNA vaccines far beyond COVID-19, including as a cancer treatment.

As a refresher, Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a molecule used by cells as a kind of blueprint to build proteins. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the vaccines use the mRNA to get your body's own cells to build the actual vaccine, namely harmless spike proteins that teach the immune system how to recognize the full virus, which uses those spike proteins to attack cells. This ability to harness our own resources to build specific proteins is very powerful.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common form of pancreatic cancer, a deadly disease that only leaves about 12% of patients alive after 5 years, in spite of modern treatments. The idea of using the immune system to attack cancer is a burgeoning and promising field of study. There are already therapeutic vaccines in use by oncologists. Now it looks like mRNA vaccines are poised to greatly expand this form of treatment.

A research team led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has been working on a personalized mRNA approach to therapeutic vaccines. After surgery to remove PDAC they sent tumor samples to BioNTech, a company you'll remember from the COVID-19 vaccine effort. They sequenced the genes of the tumors, isolated proteins that might trigger an immune response, and used that information to create a personalized vaccine for each patient, targeting up to 20 neoantigens.

Eighteen patients got an immune checkpoint inhibitor to prevent cancer cells from suppressing the immune system, followed by a series of nine doses of their custom vaccine over several months. Sixteen of the study volunteers stayed healthy enough to get at least some of the vaccine doses, and in half of them the vaccines activated powerful immune agents, called T cells, capable of recognizing the pancreatic cancer.

A year and a half later, the cancer had not returned in any of the patients with the strong T cell response.

Balachandran said, "It's exciting to see that a personalized vaccine could enlist the immune system to fight pancreatic cancer -- which urgently needs better treatments. It's also motivating as we may be able to use such personalized vaccines to treat other deadly cancers."