The first results of a clinical trial with 16 volunteers showed that a experimental messenger RNA vaccine and personalized treatment induces substantial immune response and potentially delays relapse of patients in a form of pancreatic cancer, the pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
It does this when used with other treatments, such as chemotherapy, surgery, and a type of immunotherapy. The results of the phase 1 clinical trial are published in the journal Nature, in an article led by researchers from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (United States).
The study shows that personalized mRNA vaccines “show promise” in pancreatic cancer, Nature notes.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma has low survival rates. A combination of surgical and medical therapies can delay recurrence, but their success rates are lowremember the magazine.
Recent literature suggests that most of these cancers harbor elevated levels of neoantigens, which are cell surface proteins that can arise on the surface of tumors following certain types of DNA mutations.
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These proteins may be the target of personalized vaccine therapies in order to enhance T cell activity and improve outcomes.
As the authors summarize in their article: pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is lethal in 88 percent of patients, however, it harbors mutation-derived ‘T’ cell neoantigens that are suitable for vaccines.
In this phase 1 clinical trial, Vinod Balachandran and his team administered a personalized mRNA vaccine in combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy to 16 patients. The vaccine was prepared according to the characteristics of the tumor of each patient.
They observed substantial ‘T’ cell responses in 50 percent of them, “indicating that lThe vaccine can induce an enhanced immune response.”
At 18-month follow-up, patients with vaccine-expanded T cells had a longer median recurrence-free survival compared with patients without vaccine-expanded T cells (13.4 months).
These results demonstrate the potential of individualized messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines in the treatment of this pancreatic cancer, in addition to provide evidence of its general efficacy as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of disease.
This type of mRNA vaccine put a stop to Covid-19, a technology that, however, was initially conceived to try to develop vaccines against cancer.
This is a fertile field of research thanks to better knowledge of the immune system and technical developments.
The authors note that, despite the limited sample size, These early results indicate that larger studies are warranted. of this type of preparation.
For Manel Juan, head of the Immunology Service at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, ”the study is very well designed and its scientific quality is unquestionable.”
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It demonstrates something that has been suggested many times before (with less robust data), namely that personalized vaccination with mRNA of tumor antigens is effective in inducing a response and that it can, at a minimum, increase survival periods“, according to this researcher, who does not participate in the work.
This study confirms that it can generate responses with clearly very reduced adverse effects against one of the tumors with the highest mortality, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, tells Science Media Center Spain.
“The work fits perfectly with the increasing number of studies that show evidence of these treatments. The main contribution is that it achieves it in a tumor generally considered little reactive to immunotherapy and reconfirms to all of us who consider that immunotherapy is a general proposal more dependent on the immune status of the person than on the specific type of tumor”
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