As promising, the results of a clinical trial that tested 16 volunteers in which an experimental vaccine of messenger RNA was tested that was personalized to induce a substantial immune response.
This would potentially delay the relapse of patients into a form of pancreatic cancer, specifically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
This is what you get when you use it 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 Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (United States).
The study shows that personalized messenger RNA vaccines “result promising” in pancreatic cancer, points out Nature.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma has low survival rates. A combination of surgical and medical therapies can delay the recurrence, but its success rates are reduced, remember the magazine.
Recent literature suggests that most of these cancers harbor high levels of neoantigens, which are cell surface proteins that can arise on the surface of tumors after certain types of DNA mutations.
These proteins can be the object of personalized vacunal therapies in order to enhance the activity of T cells and improve results.
According to the authors’ summary in their article: pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is lethal in 88 percent of patients, however, harbors T-cell neoantigens derived from mutations that are suitable for vaccines.
In this phase 1 clinical trial, Vinod Balachandran and his team administered a personalized message RNA vaccine in combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy to 16 patients. The vaccine was prepared according to the characteristics of each patient’s tumor.
They observed substantial T-cell responses at 50 percent of them, “which indicates that the vaccine can induce an improved immune response.”
At 18 months of follow-up, patients with vaccine-expanded T cells had a longer average relapse-free survival compared to 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 providing evidence of their general effectiveness as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of the disease.
This type of mRNA vaccines was put to the test by Covid-19, a technology that, however, was initially conceived to try to develop vaccines against cancer.
This is a fertile field of investigation thanks to better knowledge of the immune system and technical developments.
The authors indicated that, despite the limited size of the sample, these first results indicate that it is justified to carry out more extensive studies of this type of preparations.
For Manel Juan, head of the Immunología Service at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, “the studio is very well designed and its scientific quality is indudable”.
“It demonstrates something that has already been suggested many times before (with less solid data), such as that personalized vaccination with mRNA of tumor antigens is effective in inducing a response and that it can, at the very least, increase the survival periods”, according to this investigator, who does not participate in the work.
In this study it is confirmed that it can generate responses with clearly muy reduced adverse effects against one of the tumors with the highest mortality, the ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas, indicates the Science Media Center España.
“The job fits perfectly with the ever-increasing number of jobs 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 that we consider that immunotherapy is a general proposal more dependent on the immune status of the person than on the specific type of tumor”. (I)
