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A phase I trial of a messenger RNA vaccine has been carried out by the German laboratory BioNTech in patients with pancreatic cancer. The promising results were presented at the ASCO International Cancer Congress held in early June in Chicago.
Are messenger RNA vaccines the next step in cancer treatment? That’s what seems to be looming when looking at the latest results from human studies using this technology.
Promising results
This new vaccine from the firm BioNTech has been tested on 16 patients with pancreatic cancer, as part of a phase I clinical trial led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, New- York (United States). Each of the 16 patients received eight doses of the individualized vaccine, made using the genetic code of the mRNA present in each of their tumors.
The patients were thus vaccinated after having undergone surgery which enabled the removal of their tumour. Half of them remained without recurrence during the eighteen months which followed the intervention and the injections.
A vaccine that targets cells of the immune system
For American doctors, the results prove that the vaccine is able to destroy cancer cells by stimulating cells of the immune system, which would be trained to kill the first.
Indeed, the findings show that the vaccine produced a T-cell response in 8 of the 16 patients, who did not experience a recurrence of their disease during the therapeutic trial. Among the eight other patients, some died and the others saw the return of their disease, despite the vaccine.
An encouraging first attempt
“Unlike some immunotherapies, these mRNA vaccines appear to have the ability to stimulate immune responses in patients with pancreatic cancer. So we’re very excited, because these early results suggest that if you have an immune response, you might have better outcomes against the disease.“, welcomes Dr. Vinod Balachandran.
This is indeed encouraging for the future, especially for a cancer as difficult to treat as pancreatic cancer. “Any new therapy that shows such results paves the way for further study to test it more widely.“, underlines the oncologist.
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Results to be confirmed
In fact, although the results of the trial look promising, it only involved 16 people. The results must therefore be reproduced on a larger scale for them to be validated. BioNTech has already announced its commitment to take up the challenge to continue to innovate in the treatment of these pancreatic tumours.
Remember that pancreatic cancer is a very aggressive cancer: the majority of patients die within two years of diagnosis.