Excitement among patients and researchers as custom-built jabs enter phase 3 trial
Doctors have begun trialling in hundreds of patients the world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma, as experts hailed its “gamechanging” potential to permanently cure cancer.
Melanoma affects about 132,000 people a year globally and is the biggest skin cancer killer. Currently, surgery is the main treatment although radiotherapy, medicines and chemotherapy are also sometimes used.
Now experts are testing new jabs that are custom-built for each patient and tell their body to hunt down cancer cells to prevent the disease ever coming back.
A phase 2 trial found the vaccines dramatically reduced the risk of the cancer returning in melanoma patients. Now a final, phase 3, trial has been launched and is being led by University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH).
Dr Heather Shaw, the national coordinating investigator for the trial, said the jabs had the potential to cure people with melanoma and are being tested in other cancers, including lung, bladder and kidney.
Well, kinda. Vaccines are tools for “educating” your immune system. Classical vaccines generally work by providing “dead”/harmless examples of a particular infection, so that your immune system will recognize the real thing and stop it early, so it doesn’t develop to much. The immune system takes a while to get going, so “teaching” it in advance makes a huge difference against aggressive, quick acting infections.
The mRNA vaccines skip most of the “learning phase” and provide the body directly with the template to produce the right antibodies. And this is where the “cure”-part comes in. The whole problem with cancer is that it consists of a variation of your own cells. Which is why the immune system won’t target it. It’s not an infection or foreign. To your immune system it’s just another part of you. mRNA can be used to tell the immune system to attack it anyway, leveraging it against the cancer. But it requires a sample of the cells to be attacked, so as to make the right mRNA for the particular instance of cancer. So it’s not really useable as a preventative thing. At least not yet…