Pancreatic cancer is the deadliest of all known. It is usually aggressive, difficult to detect, and spreads more quickly.. Normally, when its symptoms show up, it has already caused metastasis. Its mortality rate reaches 90% according to the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology.. Many patients die despite having received the available treatments, mainly surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy.. Others do survive. Along these lines are the promising results shown by an experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, the same molecule that allowed the fight against Covid, in pancreatic cancer.
It is a new pathway that acts at the level of the immune system. Broadly speaking, the vaccine warns or activates it and “commands” it in the fight against the tumor. In this case, the key to how it works is that it was customized for each of the 16 clinical trial volunteers with the goal of inducing a substantial immune response and potentially delaying relapse of patients in a form of pancreatic cancer, adenocarcinoma. pancreatic ductal. In addition, the vaccine was used along with other treatments, such as chemotherapy, surgery, and a type of immunotherapy.
The combination of all of them with the adjuvant mRNA vaccine achieved activation of the immune system in half of the patients.. After analyzing his blood, the researchers found more T cells (also called T lymphocytes) to fight cancer cells.. Thus, eight of them did not have a relapse during the time the investigation lasted.. That is, 18 months after receiving the vaccine.
The results of the phase I clinical trial are published in the journal Nature, in an article led by researchers from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (United States).. “The study shows that personalized messenger RNA vaccines show promise in pancreatic cancer,” says Nature.
The vaccine, “breath” for lethal cancer in 88% of cases
Specifically, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma has low survival rates.. A combination of surgical and medical therapies can delay recurrence, but their success rates are low, the journal recalls.. It is lethal in 88% of patients.
Recent literature suggests that most of these cancers harbor elevated levels of neoantigens, which are cell surface proteins that can arise on the surface of tumors following certain types of DNA mutations.
The good news is that these proteins can be targeted for personalized vaccine therapies to boost T-cell activity and improve outcomes.. Because pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma harbors mutation-derived T-cell neoantigens, this made it suitable for testing vaccines and offered hope.
Thus, in this phase 1 clinical trial, Vinod Balachandran, a doctor at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and leader of the team that developed the vaccine, together with his team, administered a personalized messenger RNA vaccine in combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy. to 16 patients. The vaccine was prepared according to the characteristics of the tumor of each patient.
They observed substantial T-cell responses in 50%, “indicating that the vaccine may induce an enhanced immune response.”. At 18-month follow-up, patients with vaccine-expanded T cells had a longer median recurrence-free survival compared with patients without vaccine-expanded T cells (13.4 months).
From Covid to cancer and vice versa
These results demonstrate the potential of individualized mRNA vaccines in the treatment of this pancreatic cancer, as well as provide evidence of their overall efficacy as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of the disease.
This type of mRNA vaccine put a stop to Covid-19, a technology that, however, was initially conceived to try to develop vaccines against cancer. This is a fertile field of research thanks to better knowledge of the immune system and technical developments.
The authors note that, despite the limited sample size, these early results indicate that larger studies of this type of preparation are warranted.. For Manel Juan, head of the Immunology Service at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, “the study is very well designed and its scientific quality is unquestionable.”
“It demonstrates something that has been suggested many times before (with less robust data), which is that personalized vaccination with mRNA of tumor antigens is effective in inducing a response and that it can, at the very least, increase survival times,” according to this researcher, who did not participate in the work.
This study confirms that “it can generate responses with clearly very reduced adverse effects against one of the tumors with the highest mortality, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma,” he indicates in statements to Science Media Center Spain.
“The work fits perfectly with the increasing number of papers showing evidence of these treatments.. The main contribution is that it achieves this in a tumor generally considered not very reactive to immunotherapy and reconfirms to all of us who consider that immunotherapy is a general proposal that depends more on the person's immune status than on the specific type of tumor”, concludes Manel Juan.