During the Covid-19 pandemic, the scientific community needed quick answers and alternatives to produce vaccines that worked well against the coronavirus. The most successful initiative was the RNA vaccine, produced by pharmaceutical companies BioNTech and Pfizer.
Now a little study published this Wednesday (5/10) in the scientific journal Nature, one of the most important in the world, suggests that the technology can also be used against one of the most aggressive cancers known: that of the pancreas. The survey had been preliminarily presented in June 2022 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), but has now undergone expert review.
Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, in the United States, extracted tumors from 16 patients as part of the treatment, and sent them to BioNTech. The German company analyzed the proteins and, with the genetic information discovered, created an RNA vaccine that was able to teach the organism of half of the participants to fight against remissions.
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Pancreatic cancer is known to come back even after it has been surgically removed. In half of the patients who had an immune response after the vaccine, the disease did not reappear during the 18 months that they were followed up. In the other eight participants, the cancer recurred 13 months after surgery.
All patients also underwent chemotherapy and used a drug to prevent the tumor from returning. Therefore, the researchers are not able to say with certainty that the success of the study is due to the vaccine. Even so, the advance is considered “extremely promising” by the scientific community, as it opens doors to the treatment of a difficult-to-manage cancer.
“It’s the first time we’ve been able to demonstrate success — and I’ll call it success, despite the preliminary nature of the study — of an RNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer,” says Dr Anirban Maitra, MD Anderson Cancer Center researcher at the University of California. Texas, which was not involved in the survey, in an interview with The New York Times newspaper.
Even so, there are two major challenges to be overcome: the high price of the vaccine, which started out costing US$350,000 per dose, and now costs around US$100,000; and the production time, which was nine weeks for study participants, but BioNTech scientists intend to lower the deadline to one month.
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Those responsible for the research intend to continue following the patients and do phase 2 and 3 studies to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the treatment in larger groups of participants.
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