A vaccine that teaches the body to selectively destroy tumors or in a general sense, any foreign body had eluded cancer researchers for decades despite many trials. But not anymore!
Now two personalized cancer vaccine approaches appear to have safely prevented cancer relapse in a dozen patients with late-stage skin cancer.
It is common knowledge that each patient’s tumour harbours a unique set of genetic characteristics, or mutations. So for cancer vaccines to be effective, they’ll also have to be unique.
But working out the unique mutations of each person’s cancer, a time-consuming and complicated process, must first be identified before a vaccine can be developed for them.
Two clinical trials, detailed today in separate papers in Nature, are among the first to show that this might be possible. The two personalized cancer vaccines have been found to be safe and effective at treating people with melanoma, say the scientists.
While they are very small scale—one was on six participants, the other 13—the findings mean researchers can move ahead with the vaccines, which could potentially lead to new, more effective cancer treatments.
The vaccines developed by German and U.S. teams respectively have enabled patients to avoid relapse for two years
after receiving them.One vaccine was developed at the U.S.-based Dana-Farber Institute and Broad Institute and the other by privately owned German biotech firm BioNTech, which uses the mRNA to carry the code for making its therapeutic proteins.
The small Phase I trials now need to be followed by larger studies, but the impressive early results suggest the new shots work far better than first-generation cancer vaccines that typically targeted a single cancer characteristic.
BioNTech’s co-founder and CEO Ugur Sahin says, “In the mid to long term the cost will fall dramatically … it is an individual treatment but it is a universal process,” he said. “We are at a very early stage at the moment but in the long-run this approach could change everything.”
Both Sahin and Catherine Wu of the Dana Farber Institute, founder of the Neon Therapeutics, who led the smaller trial, says it took their research teams about three to four months to make each vaccine. They’ve gotten that process down to six weeks or less. Currently, cancer patients begin treatment with traditional therapies about three to six weeks after an initial diagnosis, and Wu says she aims to treat patients with a cancer vaccine in that same window.
