Five years ago, a small group of cancer scientists meeting at a restaurant in a deconsecrated church hospital in Mainz, Germany, drew up an audacious plan: They would test their novel cancer vaccine against one of the most virulent forms of the disease, a cancer notorious for roaring back even in patients whose tumours had been removed.
The vaccine might not stop those relapses, some of the scientists figured. But patients were desperate. And the speed with which the disease, pancreatic cancer, often recurred could work to the scientists’ advantage: For better or worse, they would find out soon whether the vaccine helped.
On Wednesday, the scientists reported results that defied the long odds. The vaccine provoked an immune response in half of the patients treated, and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study, a finding that outside experts described as extremely promising.
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The study, published in Nature, was a landmark in the yearslong movement to make cancer vaccines tailored to the tumours of individual patients.
Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients’ tumours and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful Covid vaccine with Pfizer, analysed the genetic make-up of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells.
Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalised vaccines designed to teach each patient’s immune system to attack the tumours. Like BioNTech’s Covid shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients’ cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumours, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.
In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked.
“This is the first demonstrable success – and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study – of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer,” said Dr Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. “By that standard, it’s a milestone.” — This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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