So for decades, researchers have working on personalised cancer vaccines designed to make the immune system recognise and attack the cancers specific to each individual. The results have been mixed but now a personalised cancer vaccine has produced positive results in a final-stage trial for the first time. Moderna announced on 19 August that people who had undergone surgery to remove severe skin cancers called melonomas survived longer without the cancer returning or spreading to other parts of the body if they were given a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine in conjunction with another immunotherapy, compared with that immunotherapy alone.
Personalised cancer vaccines are finally beating hard to treat tumours The hope is this personalised vaccine will work for many other types of cancer, and trials are already underway for certain kinds of lung, kidney and bladder forms of the condition. The other big mRNA company, BioNTech, is also testing personalised cancer vaccines in human trials. Cancers are caused by cells accumulating mutations to the point where they go rogue and start multiplying out of control.
Mutations in proteins that protrude from the surface of cells also make cancer cells “look” a bit different to other cells. This allows our immune system to recognise and kill off many cancers without us ever knowing about it. But some cancers slip through the net – the idea of cancer vaccines is to teach the immune system to recognise such cancers.
In the case of the Moderna vaccine, called intismeran autogene, a sample of a person’s cancer – a biopsy – is sequenced. It’s then compared with their healthy blood cells to identify surface proteins on the cancerous cells that have distinctive mutations. Up to 34 are selected, and mRNAs coding for those proteins are made and put in the vaccine.
The cancer vaccine is injected into muscles, just like with the covid-19 mRNA vaccine. Cells in the muscles then temporarily produce the cancer proteins, triggering an immune response to them. It’s possible to use other kinds of vaccines, but mRNA has two huge advantages: speed and cost.
Making protein-based vaccines requires using living cells, which is time-consuming and requires many safety checks. For people with cancer, the faster a vaccine can be created, the better. An analysis of ongoing trials suggests that mRNA cancer vaccines have the potential to deliver health benefits worth $75 billion each year in the US alone It’s a so-called anti-PD-1 therapy consisting of an antibody called pembrolizumab (Keytruda).
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