From: https://letswinpc.org (Image: National Library of Medecine)
A promising personalized mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer could potentially beat the disease at its own game.
According to a new study published in the journal Nature, the vaccine—named autogene cevumeran—produces what are called durable T cells. Simply put, these T cells are capable of doing their job—fighting cancer cells that may reappear sporadically—for a long period of time.
This is a critical point, as pancreatic cancer cells are particularly aggressive and spread throughout the body much earlier than other cancers. Even when a patient is diagnosed early enough to undergo surgery—the only potential cure—doctors remain concerned about recurrence. This is because malignant cells too small to be detected by imaging may be hiding in other organs. Some estimates suggest there is a 60 to 80 percent chance of recurrence after surgery.
“The latest data from our phase I trial of personalized RNA vaccines in patients with pancreatic cancer continue to be encouraging,” says surgeon-scientist Dr. Vinod Balachandran of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York, in an interview with Let’s Win. “We’re seeing signs of a robust anti-tumor immune response after vaccination that could potentially last for years in some patients—and this immune response continues to correlate with delayed recurrence,” he adds. Dr. Balachandran is the principal investigator and senior author of the study.
New results from the phase I clinical trial show that the therapeutic cancer vaccine activated tumor-specific immune cells that persisted in the body for up to nearly four years after treatment in some patients. Moreover, patients who triggered an immune response from the vaccine showed a reduced risk of cancer recurrence after three years of follow-up, compared to patients whose immune systems did not respond.
Activated T Cell Response Linked to Delayed Recurrence
The clinical trial involved 16 patients who received the vaccine in combination with an immunotherapy drug called atezolizumab and the mFOLFIRINOX chemotherapy regimen. Early immunological and clinical results from the trial, published in Nature in 2023, showed that the treatment was generally well tolerated and stimulated an immune response associated with delayed recurrence after a median follow-up of 1.5 years compared to non-responders.
The new paper presents findings after a median follow-up of three years, revealing that:
- The investigational cancer vaccine triggered a T cell response in half of the patients (eight responders), and this response was associated with delayed recurrence three years post-treatment compared to non-responders. Researchers do not yet know if the vaccine directly caused the delay in recurrence; answering that question is the focus of an ongoing randomized phase II clinical trial.
- Among the eight patients who exhibited an immune response during the study, six have not seen their cancer return during the follow-up period. The other two relapsed. Those who relapsed showed weaker vaccine-induced T cell activity compared to the other responders.
- By analyzing tissue and blood samples from these patients before and after vaccination, the research team found that the majority of the T cells were newly stimulated by the vaccine, as they were undetectable before. Additionally, most of these vaccine-induced T cells persisted beyond two years post-vaccination and maintained anticancer function in some patients.
“These promising results remain preliminary and involve a small number of patients,” notes Dr. Balachandran, director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at MSK. Larger-scale testing is currently underway in a global randomized phase II trial.
“For patients with pancreatic cancer, our latest results continue to support the approach of using personalized mRNA vaccines to target neoantigens unique to each tumor,” Dr. Balachandran explains. “If we can do this in pancreatic cancer, theoretically we may be able to develop therapeutic vaccines for other cancer types as well.”
Editor’s note: It is important to note that mRNA vaccine research is currently yielding very promising results in the fight against HIV. The company Moderna is already conducting a phase I clinical trial of its HIV vaccine in patients in the United States.
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