Using mRNA tailored to each patient’s tumor, the vaccine may have staved off the return of one of the deadliest forms of cancer in half of those who received it.
Five years ago, a small group of cancer scientists meeting at a restaurant in a deconsecrated church hospital in Mainz, Germany, drew up an audacious plan: They would test their novel cancer vaccine against one of the most virulent forms of the disease, a cancer notorious for roaring back even in patients whose tumors had been removed.
The vaccine might not stop those relapses, some of the scientists figured. But patients were desperate. And the speed with which the disease, pancreatic cancer, often recurred could work to the scientists’ advantage: For better or worse, they would find out soon whether the vaccine helped.
On Wednesday, the scientists reported results that defied the long odds. The vaccine provoked an immune response in half of the patients treated, and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study, a finding that outside experts described as extremely promising.
The study, published in Nature, was a landmark in the yearslong movement to make cancer vaccines tailored to the tumors of individual patients.
Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients’ tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful Covid vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells.
“This is the first demonstrable success — and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study — of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer,” said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. “By that standard, it’s a milestone.”
The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people’s immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients.
“It’s relatively early days,” said Dr. Patrick Ott of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Beyond that, “cost is a major barrier for these types of vaccines to be more broadly utilized,” said Dr. Neeha Zaidi, a pancreatic cancer specialist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. That could potentially create disparities in access.
Since the beginning of the study, in December 2019, BioNTech has shortened the process to under six weeks, said Dr. Ugur Sahin, a co-founder of the company, who worked on the study. Eventually, the company intends to be able to make cancer vaccines in four weeks.
And since it first began testing the vaccines about a decade ago, BioNTech has lowered the cost from roughly $350,000 per dose to less than $100,000 by automating parts of production, Dr. Sahin said.
A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine developed by Moderna and Merck reduced the risk of relapse in patients who had surgery for melanoma, a type of skin cancer, the companies announced last month. But the latest study set the bar higher by targeting pancreatic cancer, which is thought to have fewer of the genetic changes that would make it ripe for vaccine treatments.
In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked.
Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests.
“It’s anecdotal, but it’s nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions,” said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Scientists have struggled for decades to create cancer vaccines, in part because they trained the immune system on proteins found on tumors and normal cells alike.
Tailoring vaccines to mutated proteins found only on cancer cells, though, potentially helped provoke stronger immune responses and opened new avenues for treating any cancer patient, said Ira Mellman, vice president of cancer immunology at Genentech, which developed the pancreatic cancer vaccine with BioNTech.
“Just establishing the proof of concept that vaccines in cancer can actually do something after, I don’t know, thirty years of failure is probably not a bad thing,” Dr. Mellman said. “We’ll start with that.”
News
New mRNA therapy targets drug-resistant pneumonia
Bacteria that multiply on surfaces are a major headache in health care when they gain a foothold on, for example, implants or in catheters. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have found [...]
Current Heart Health Guidelines Are Failing To Catch a Deadly Genetic Killer
New research reveals that standard screening misses most people with a common inherited cholesterol disorder. A Mayo Clinic study reports that current genetic screening guidelines overlook most people who have familial hypercholesterolemia, an inherited disorder that [...]
Scientists Identify the Evolutionary “Purpose” of Consciousness
Summary: Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum explore why consciousness evolved and why different species developed it in distinct ways. By comparing humans with birds, they show that complex awareness may arise through different neural architectures yet [...]
Novel mRNA therapy curbs antibiotic-resistant infections in preclinical lung models
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and collaborators have reported early success with a novel mRNA-based therapy designed to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The findings, published in Nature Biotechnology, show that in [...]
New skin-permeable polymer delivers insulin without needles
A breakthrough zwitterionic polymer slips through the skin’s toughest barriers, carrying insulin deep into tissue and normalizing blood sugar, offering patients a painless alternative to daily injections. A recent study published in the journal Nature examines [...]
Multifunctional Nanogels: A Breakthrough in Antibacterial Strategies
Antibiotic resistance is a growing concern - from human health to crop survival. A new study successfully uses nanogels to target and almost entirely inhibit the bacteria P. Aeruginosa. Recently published in Angewandte Chemie, the study [...]
Nanoflowers rejuvenate old and damaged human cells by replacing their mitochondria
Biomedical researchers at Texas A&M University may have discovered a way to stop or even reverse the decline of cellular energy production—a finding that could have revolutionary effects across medicine. Dr. Akhilesh K. Gaharwar [...]
The Stunning New Push to Protect the Invisible 99% of Life
Scientists worldwide have joined forces to build the first-ever roadmap for conserving Earth’s vast invisible majority—microbes. Their new IUCN Specialist Group reframes conservation by elevating microbial life to the same urgency as plants and [...]
Scientists Find a Way to Help the Brain Clear Alzheimer’s Plaques Naturally
Scientists have discovered that the brain may have a built-in way to fight Alzheimer’s. By activating a protein called Sox9, researchers were able to switch on star-shaped brain cells known as astrocytes and turn them into [...]
Vision can be rebooted in adults with amblyopia, study suggests
Temporarily anesthetizing the retina briefly reverts the activity of the visual system to that observed in early development and enables growth of responses to the amblyopic eye, new research shows. In the common vision [...]
Ultrasound-activated Nanoparticles Kill Liver Cancer and Activate Immune System
A new ultrasound-guided nanotherapy wipes out liver tumors while training the immune system to keep them from coming back. The study, published in Nano Today, introduces a biodegradable nanoparticle system that combines sonodynamic therapy and cell [...]
Magnetic nanoparticles that successfully navigate complex blood vessels may be ready for clinical trials
Every year, 12 million people worldwide suffer a stroke; many die or are permanently impaired. Currently, drugs are administered to dissolve the thrombus that blocks the blood vessel. These drugs spread throughout the entire [...]
Reviving Exhausted T Cells Sparks Powerful Cancer Tumor Elimination
Scientists have discovered how tumors secretly drain the energy from T cells—the immune system’s main cancer fighters—and how blocking that process can bring them back to life. The team found that cancer cells use [...]
Very low LDL-cholesterol correlates to fewer heart problems after stroke
Brigham and Women's Hospital's TIMI Study Group reports that in patients with prior ischemic stroke, very low achieved LDL-cholesterol correlated with fewer major adverse cardiovascular events and fewer recurrent strokes, without an apparent increase [...]
“Great Unified Microscope” Reveals Hidden Micro and Nano Worlds Inside Living Cells
University of Tokyo researchers have created a powerful new microscope that captures both forward- and back-scattered light at once, letting scientists see everything from large cell structures to tiny nanoscale particles in a single shot. Researchers [...]
Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Drug Has a Hidden Problem
Researchers in Japan found that although the Alzheimer’s drug lecanemab successfully removes amyloid plaques from the brain, it does not restore the brain’s waste-clearing system within the first few months of treatment. The study suggests that [...]
