Experimental RNA Vaccine Shows Promising Results in Pancreatic Cancer
Early results from a clinical trial involving 16 volunteers showed that an experimental, personalized mRNA vaccine induces a substantial immune response and potentially delays relapse in patients with a form of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
It does this when used with other treatments, such as chemotherapy, surgery, and a type of immunotherapy.. The results of the phase 1 clinical trial are published in the journal Nature, in an article led by researchers from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (United States).
The drug against metastatic pancreatic cancer is available again after Health forced its exit
“Pancreatic cancer has a high mortality, but advances in surgery and treatment allow long survivors”
The study shows that personalized mRNA vaccines “show promise” in pancreatic cancer, Nature notes.
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.
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.
These proteins may be the target of personalized vaccine therapies in order to enhance T cell activity and improve outcomes.
As the authors summarize in their article: pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is lethal in 88% of patients, yet it harbors mutation-derived T-cell neoantigens that are suitable for vaccines.
In this phase 1 clinical trial, Vinod Balachandran and his team administered a personalized mRNA 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% of them, “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).
These results demonstrate the potential of individualized messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines in the treatment of this pancreatic cancer, in addition to providing 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 suggest 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, tells 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”.