The Phase 1 clinical trial of the world’s first vaccine against lung cancer has been launched at 34 research centres in seven countries (the United States, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary and Turkey) and 130 patients have already been enrolled to receive the drug dose along with immunotherapy treatment.
The start of trials of this vaccine raises great expectations, given that it is the type of cancer that causes the most deaths in the world, with almost 1.8 million fatal cases per year, given that the chances of survival in the advanced stages of the disease are very low.
But there is also some expectation that the new vaccine uses messenger RNA, similar to those used against Covid-19. In this case, the drug acts in such a way that the body seeks out and destroys cancer cells while preventing their reappearance.
The drug was developed by BioNTech and was prepared to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
As with the Covid-19 vaccines, BNT116 (the name of the lung cancer vaccine being tested) uses messenger RNA, which, according to the US National Cancer Institute, “has the genetic information needed to make proteins and carries this information from the DNA in the nucleus of the cell to the cytoplasm where proteins are made.”
The drug works by presenting tumor markers for this type of cancer to the immune system so that the body can fight the cancer cells that express these markers.
In this way, it is as if the immune system is trained to act in the event that this form of lung cancer occurs.
The drug under test has an advantage over chemotherapy, as it strengthens the immune system’s response without affecting healthy cells.
Oncologist Siow Ming Lee, who is leading the trial in the UK, stressed the significance of the test as it opens a new era of clinical trials of immunotherapy using messenger RNA for lung cancer research.
For some scientists, this technology represents the next big phase in cancer treatment.
Lee, for his part, stressed that the drug “is easy to administer and specific antigens can be selected in the cancer cell and then attacked.”
Lung cancer mainly affects men.
Most of those who suffer from it (80%) are diagnosed in advanced stages of the disease, which is why five-year survival is very low.
