A personalised cancer vaccine given alongside a widely used immunotherapy drug can cut the risk of patients dying or skin cancer returning by 42 per cent in what has been hailed a “major breakthrough”.
The phase three trial of the mRNA jab coupled with immunotherapy, which tracked more than 1,100 patients, found it reduced the risk of melanoma — the most aggressive form of skin cancer causing about 2,600 deaths a year in the UK — spreading by 38 per cent over two years compared to the use of immunotherapy alone.
Normally, only around a third of patients with the worst form of the disease live for five years after diagnosis.
The success has been celebrated as the start of a new era for personalised cancer vaccines and frug manufacturers MSD and Moderna said the combined approach was now being tested on other types of cancers, including kidney, bladder and lung.
“The personalised cancer vaccine uses exciting technology to stimulate the patient’s own immune system to recognise and attack any tumour cells remaining after surgery,” Professor Pippa Corrie, a consultant medical oncologist who helped run part of the study with patients at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, said.
“It is a whole new approach to cancer treatment which is designed to improve outcomes compared with standard anticancer drug treatments that don't take into account individual differences, and this trial was the first proof of principle,” she added.
For the study, 1,137 adults were given Keytruda, an immunotherapy drug which helps the immune system find and attack cancer cells. About two-thirds were also given the experimental vaccine and the rest were given a placebo.
The vaccine, called Intismeran, is personalised to each patient and uses cells from own tumour to train their immune system to spot the cancer cells that need to be targeted.
