(NEW YORK) — A personalized mRNA vaccine may reduce the risks of pancreatic cancer returning after surgery, according to a preliminary study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive cancers, with a typical survival rate of only about a year after the diagnosis according to the study.
While the findings are encouraging, the vaccine is still in early testing and will likely take years before it becomes widely available — assuming ongoing trials continue to show success, according to Dr. Vinod P. Balachandran, lead investigator of the trial and senior author of the study.
In this small, preliminary trial of 16 patients, half had a strong immune response to the vaccine. Most of these responders remained cancer-free for more than three years, much longer than those who didn’t respond.
The vaccine works by training specialized immune system cells, known as T cells, to recognize and attack the cancer.
Researchers couldn’t track tumor shrinkage because all patients had surgery to remove visible cancer before vaccination. However, they found that the vaccine produced long-lasting T cells that may keep fighting cancer for years.
“This is one way through which you can make lots of T cells, and you can make these T cells such that they can persist for a long time in patients and retain their function,” Balachandran said.
Balachandran said “to be able to get an immune response has been very challenging,” especially when an illness like pancreatic cancer typically does not respond to vaccines, which highlights the significance of these findings.
A larger trial is now underway to confirm the results. If successful, this approach could lead to new ways to treat or even prevent pancreatic and other advanced cancers.
Overall, Balachandran said this study can “provide some important clues on how you would be able to develop vaccines more broadly for other cancers.”
“Hopefully this information that we will learn from these clinical trials will give us information to know apply vaccines in other settings, such as primary prevention, meaning preventing cancers from occurring even before they occur, with vaccines or perhaps also using it to treat patients who have more advanced disease,” Balachandran said.
-Suhas Kochat, MD, contributed to this report
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