Personalized mRNA vaccines may enhance therapeutic efficacy

Pancreatic cancer is one of them. the deadliest type of cancer. This is largely due to the fact that symptoms of pancreatic cancer do not appear until late in the disease, so many patients do not have the current best treatment of surgery to remove the tumor.

Even in patients with resected tumors, many with a really high probability cancer recurrence.

However, recent research suggests that the immune system may be a useful tool in treating pancreatic cancer. A study published in Natureshowed that a personalized cancer vaccine could stimulate the immune system in half of the patients who received it.

This enhanced immune response was still detectable in these patients after 18 months.

To understand how this pancreatic cancer vaccine works, it is important to first understand the role the immune system plays in preventing cancer.

Our immune systems are often very well equipped to fight cancer. Unfortunately, however, cancer cells contain specific protein receptors whose purpose is to help cancer cells hide from immune cells, effectively preventing the immune system from destroying them. .

But scientists have found a way to block these receptors, allowing the immune system to recognize cancer cells as a threat again and eliminate them.

what are these immunotherapy – one of the newest technologies for cancer treatment – ​​will. These treatments work by harnessing the power of the immune system.

There are several different types of immunotherapy, but a promising new therapy against cancer is the use of mRNA vaccines. These use genetic material to stimulate the immune system.

Scientists start by taking the genetic material of cancer cells, identifying the most mutated parts of DNA (so-called neoantigens), and then inserting them between mRNA strands.

If you think of DNA as your hard drive, mRNA is like your cell’s software. Its function is basically to copy and carry genetic instructions from DNA to other parts of the cell.

This mRNA will be administered to patients as a personalized vaccine. This is individualized because each person has different neoantigens, and everyone will receive slightly different vaccines with slightly different mutations encoded in the mRNA strands.

When injected into a patient, the mRNA produces just enough cancer to stimulate the immune system. The idea is that the person’s immune system responds to and defends against cancer.

This is how the recent pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine was developed. Pharmaceutical company BioNtech used cells from recently resected tumors to create a personalized mRNA vaccine for 16 participants.

All patients were treated with this personalized vaccine alongside another form of immunotherapy (the drug atezolizumab) followed by aggressive chemotherapy.

Half of the patients treated with a combination of vaccines and immunotherapy showed an increase in certain types of immune cells (called T cells, known to protect against cancer). This showed the researchers that, for at least some participants, the immune system may be learning how to fight cancer.

At 18 months of follow-up, patients with increased T cells still showed signs of improved immune responses. And most had no signs of cancer coming back.

The authors concluded that the immune system was successfully stimulated and prevented the cancer from returning. Also, the mRNA vaccine was well tolerated by patients with no apparent serious side effects.

immune function

Although the results of this trial are interesting, the numbers are too small to draw any major conclusions. Larger trials, including randomized studies, will need to be conducted.

This will allow only a subset of participants to be vaccinated, allowing researchers to see how the vaccine works, and how the vaccine stimulates the immune system to relapse (and ultimately survival). You will truly understand if it does its job of improving your time. .

This will also allow us to determine whether the vaccine has a definite effect and that this effect is not solely due to other treatments or immunotherapies that the participants received.

It is promising that new types of therapies may be investigated to treat pancreatic cancer. These findings also highlight the potential of mRNA vaccines as a broader cancer treatment, building on the results of another study last year that showed that mRNA vaccines could be used to treat a broader range of cancers. . effective for melanoma.