Surgeons and immunologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering wanted to know whether a vaccine built from each patient's own tumor mutations could train the immune system to catch cells that surgery left behind.
In a phase 1 trial, sixteen patients received a personalized mRNA vaccine after surgery, alongside chemotherapy and an immune checkpoint drug. In eight of them the vaccine triggered tumor specific T cells. At a median follow-up of 18 months, none of those eight patients had a recurrence, unlike the rest of the group.
The eight patients whose immune systems did not respond to the vaccine relapsed at a median of about 13 months, the pattern expected for this cancer. The trial was small, open-label, and run at a single center, but a later follow-up found the vaccine-induced T cells persisting for years in some patients, and larger randomized trials are now testing the same approach.
Read the original study
Rojas et al., Nature, 2023 · doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06063-y
Half the group, no recurrence yet.
Source
- Rojas, L. A., Sethna, Z., Soares, K. C., Olcese, C., Pang, N., Patterson, E., Lihm, J., Ceglia, N., Guasp, P., Chu, A., Yu, R., Chandra, A. K., Waters, T., Ruan, J., Amisaki, M., Zebboudj, A., Odgerel, Z., Payne, G., Derhovanessian, E., . . . Balachandran, V. P. (2023). Personalized RNA neoantigen vaccines stimulate T cells in pancreatic cancer. Nature, 618(7963), 144–150. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06063-y