“Personalized mRNA Vaccine for Pancreatic Cancer Shows Promise in Clinical Trials”

Pancreatic cancer is a rare tumor in Spain, but it constitutes the third leading cause of cancer death with a rate of 90% mortalityaccording to Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM). This is due to its asymptomatic nature and the difficulty of treating it. However, a new avenue of treatment has been opened through the use of personalized messenger RNA vaccines.

In a clinical trial with 16 patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the formula “adjuvant autogenic cevumeran” was able to activate the T lymphocytes of the immune system so that they recognized cancer cells by protein mutations and attacked them.

Patients received personalized mRNA vaccines encoding up to 20 neoantigens from their own tumors, analyzed and sequenced after surgical removal. In addition, they were given atezolizumab, an “immune checkpoint inhibitor” (ICI) whose job is to energize cancer-reactive T cells that have been depleted during the process.

The combination of surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapeutic ICI, and mRNA adjuvanted vaccine elicited a positive immune response in half of the participants, as demonstrated by blood tests that showed they had more T cells and were more specific for fight cancer cells.

NEW PATH OF HOPE

As a result, patients with a good prognosis were free of pancreatic tumor recurrences 18 months after receiving the vaccine. The researchers noted that activating the immune response also helped prevent spread to other organs in the body.

However, half of the group did not respond well to the vaccine, which means that not all patients are likely to benefit. The median cancer recurrence was 13.4 months after the start of treatment.

The next steps will be to identify predictive biomarkers that help determine in which patients it works and in which it does not. The treatment could be improved by associating other immunotherapeutics that increase the response capacity and verify if it helps to eliminate the toxicity associated with chemotherapy.