Experimental pancreatic cancer vaccine shows promise

Half of patients who received an experimental pancreatic cancer vaccine developed by Roche and BioNTech in an early-stage trial were still alive, most with no signs of disease recurrence, more than three years after treatment, according to a report published by Reuters.

• A new step in pancreatic cancer treatment

Pancreatic cancer is known for its extremely poor survival rate, but the recent study offers hope for patients affected by the disease. Researchers observed that patients with long-term survival have immune systems capable of recognizing and attacking mutant proteins, or neoantigens, present in cancer cells. The therapeutic vaccine Autogene cevumeran, based on messenger RNA technology, was able to trigger this immunological effect in eight of the 16 participants in the study. The results, published in the journal Nature, show that six of the eight patients who responded positively to the vaccine showed no signs of relapse after an average follow-up of 3.2 years.

• How does the vaccine work?

Autogene cevumeran is a personalized vaccine designed to deliver instructions to the immune system so that it recognizes and destroys tumor cells specific to each patient. The treatment regimen included: Surgery to remove the tumor; Administration of the experimental vaccine; Tecentriq (atezolizumab) immunotherapy developed by Roche; Standard chemotherapy.

• Differences in patient response

The researchers cannot explain why only some patients responded to the vaccine. The two patients who relapsed, despite an initial response to the vaccine, showed weaker immune responses than the other six. On the other hand, of the eight patients who did not respond to the vaccine, seven had cancer relapses at an average interval of 13.4 months after surgery.

• Next Steps in Research

The early-stage study was designed to test the vaccine's safety, not its effectiveness. Therefore, researchers cannot yet confirm that the vaccine was the direct cause of the delay in cancer recurrence. A larger, mid-stage clinical trial is currently underway that could provide more information about the treatment's effectiveness. "For patients with pancreatic cancer, our latest results continue to support the approach of using personalized messenger RNA vaccines to target neoantigens in each patient's tumor," said study leader Dr. Vinod Balachandran, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. If future results confirm the benefits seen, the experimental vaccine could represent a major breakthrough in pancreatic cancer treatment, giving patients a real chance at long-term survival.