A new personalized messenger RNA vaccine raises hopes against the most widespread and aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, known as pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma: in a phase 1 clinical trial it caused an increase in patients’ immune responses and delayed recurrence in half of the cases, when used in combination with other treatments.
The vaccine, developed in a study published in the journal Nature and led by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, therefore fuels expectations for this approach, against tumors and beyond: it follows in the footsteps of therapy against melanoma (an aggressive skin cancer) developed by the pharmaceutical company Moderna, based on the same technology as the anti-Covid vaccine and in an advanced stage of experimentation.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the most common form of pancreatic cancer. It is a very aggressive pathology, with very low survival rates and a prognosis usually less than 5 years: a combination of surgical and other types of therapies can delay the recurrence somewhat, but with poor success rates.
However, recent studies have shown that most patients suffering from this type of cancer present high levels of new antigens, i.e. proteins located on the surface of cells that emerge on tumors following DNA mutations. These proteins, therefore, can become the target of personalized vaccine therapies, with the aim of improving the outcome of the treatments.
Indeed, the advances in messenger RNA technology made since the beginning of the Covid pandemic have ushered in a new phase in the field of vaccines, not only against various forms of cancer, but also for heart, infectious and autoimmune diseases. Moderna is convinced of this, committed to developing a new series of life-saving vaccines by 2030, as the company unveiled last month. The same approach could also pave the way for rare diseases, albeit with a slightly longer timeframe.
This is the path also attempted by researchers led by Luis Rojas and Zachary Sethna, who administered their mRna vaccine to 16 patients together with chemotherapy and immunotherapy, starting a phase I clinical trial. The purpose of this phase of the experimentation is above all to study the safety of the drug and the presence of any side effects: for this reason, the participants are usually healthy subjects, but in this case the authors of the study involved people who were already ill. The results show an increase in the immune response in 50% of the patients, also related to longer times of relapse after 18 months, while subjects who did not experience improvements in the activity of the immune system experienced a worsening of the disease after an average of 13.4 months. According to the authors of the study, these data are sufficient to move to the next phase of the experimentation, involving a much larger sample.
