By Mark Waghorn via SWNS
A personalized skin cancer vaccine has almost halved the risk of death or relapse in melanoma patients.
Adding the jab immunotherapy drugs reduced the likelihood of recurrence of the deadliest form of the disease by 44 percent.
Senior Investigator Professor Jeffrey Weber, of New York University, said: “Our phase 2b study shows that a neoantigen mRNA vaccine, when used in combination with pembrolizumab, resulted in prolonged time without recurrence or death compared with pembrolizumab alone.”
The trial involved men and women who had surgery to remove melanoma from lymph nodes or other organs and were at high risk of the disease returning in sites distant from the original cancer.
Among 107 participants injected with experimental vaccine mRNA-4157/V940 and immunotherapy pembrolizumab, cancer returned in 24 (22.4%) within two years.
This is compared with 20 out of 50 (40%) who received only pembrolizumab.
About 7,990 people are expected to die of melanoma in the USA in 2023, according to The American Cancer Society’s estimates.
These results presented at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Orlando provide preliminary reassurance.
Larger studies will be needed to confirm the findings. Phase 3 trials of the combination are already being planned in New York and globally.
In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to mRNA-4157/V940 in combination with pembrolizumab, a designation designed to speed government reviews of trial results.
It triggers immune system T cells to attack tumors. To spare normal cells, the system uses “checkpoint” molecules on T cell surfaces to turn off their attack against viruses when they clear an infection.
The body may recognize tumors as abnormal, but cancer cells hijack checkpoints to turn off, evade and avoid immune responses.
Immunotherapies like pembrolizumab seek to block checkpoints, making cancer cells more “visible” and vulnerable again to immune cells.
Immunotherapies have become the mainstay for treating melanoma. But they do not work for all patients because melanoma cells, known for their ability to evade the immune system, can become resistant to immunotherapy.
For this reason, researchers have looked at adding vaccines. While most vaccines used today are designed to prevent infections, they can also be tailored to target proteins involved in cancer.
Like the COVID-19 vaccine, mRNA-4157/V940 is based on messenger RNA, a chemical cousin of DNA that provides instructions to cells for making proteins.
It is designed to teach the body’s immune system to recognize cancer cells as different from normal cells. In designing a vaccine against melanoma, researchers attempted to trigger an immune response to specific abnormal proteins, called ‘neoantigens,’ made by cancer cells.
The study volunteers all had their tumors removed. Researchers were able to analyze their cells for neoantigens that were specific to each melanoma and create a ‘personalized’ vaccine for each patient.
As a result, T cells were produced specifically for the neoantigen proteins encoded by the mRNA. Those T cells could then attack any melanoma cells trying to grow or spread.
The vaccine took about six to eight weeks to develop for each patient and could recognize as many as 34 neoantigens.
Severe side effects were similar between the two arms of the study, they said, with fatigue being the most common side effect specific to the vaccine reported by patients.
About 1.3 million Americans are currently diagnosed with melanomas. Scientists predict skin cancer will become the second most common type of cancer in the U.S. by 2040.
The post Skin cancer vaccine may slash risk of death or relapse: study appeared first on Talker.
by: Talker News
published on talker