“Promising Results of Personalized mRNA Vaccine for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment: Clinical Trial Shows Enhanced Immune Response and Longer Survival”

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest known. presumes death for 88% of patients who suffer from it. science fights daily to reduce that annoying percentage. In search of a thread of hope in the form of a vaccine or treatment against one of the most difficult-to-treat tumors. In part, because of how difficult it is to detect by the immune system.

The first results of a clinical trial with 16 volunteers showed that an experimental and personalized messenger RNA vaccine activated their immune system. In the 18 months that the tests lasted, none had relapses.

These are preliminary results of a phase 1 clinical trial published in the journal Nature, in an article led by researchers from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (United States). The study shows that personalized mRNA vaccines “show promise” in pancreatic cancer, Nature notes.

The most aggressive version of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, has low survival rates. A combination of surgical and medical therapies can delay recurrence. Even so, their success rates are low, recalls the magazine.

Recent literature suggests that most of these cancers harbor elevated levels of neoantigens, which are cell surface proteins that can arise on the surface of tumors following certain types of DNA mutations. These proteins may be the target of personalized vaccine therapies in order to enhance T cell activity and improve outcomes.

Although the authors of the article recall that pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma barely leaves 12% of those who suffer from it alive, there is a door of hope: the presence of neoantigens.

In this phase 1 clinical trial, Vinod Balachandran and his team administered a personalized mRNA vaccine in combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy to sixteen patients. The vaccine was prepared according to the characteristics of the tumor of each patient. They observed positive T cell responses in 50% of them.“indicating that the vaccine may induce an enhanced immune response.”

At eighteen months of follow-up, patients with vaccine-expanded T cells had a longer median life-span survival compared with patients without vaccine-expanded T cells (13.4 months).

These results demonstrate the potential of individualized messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines in the treatment of this pancreatic cancer, in addition to providing evidence of their overall efficacy as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of the disease.