Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, but there is some encouraging news. A clinical trial of 16 post operative patients whose tumors were removed were given an mRNA vaccine, based on their tumors, to fight their cancer. Half of them had no sign of recurrence after two years. Most pancreatic cancer patients have a recurrence by that time, even with chemotherapy. All patients in the trial did have chemotherapy.
Only 20% of pancreatic cancer patients are eligible for surgery to remove their tumor.
The idea, says Doctor Anirban Maitra, Scientific Director of the Pancreas Cancer Research Center at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, is to "Train the body's immune system so that it can essentially conduct surveillance duty and prevent the cancer from coming back in patients who have undergone surgery. The reason it's personalized is that the vaccines are made in a way that each vaccine is unique to each patients with pancreatic cancer." They are made post surgery, the tumor is processed, specific targets are identified for each individual patients, a process that takes nine weeks."
He says the goals of this phase one trial were safety and feasibility, and both passed. "Efficacy, does the vaccine actually work, that question is only a secondary outcome. At this point it's too early to say whether the vaccine really made a difference. At this point there are some hints, some suggestions that it might have made a difference. We'll have to wait for larger trials." He says he is cautiously optimistic. "We hope we continue to see the same trend, that there are patients who are able to double up a vaccine-induced immune response against the cancer and the tumor does not come back. That is really the goal of being able to enhance the survival of these patients and potentially cure them of the disease. Unfortunately that does not happen in the context of pancreas cancer in too many patients....it is a big deal."
The trial was conducted by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York in conjunction with Roche and BioNTech, makers of the Pfizer BioNTech covid vaccine. mRNA vaccines have never been used for pancreatic cancer but have shown promise for melanoma in trials by drugmaker Merck.
The study was published in the journal Nature.
He would love to see a time when patients can skip at least some aspects of chemotherapy by using more gentle approaches like vaccines. For example, leukemia and breast cancer patients are given more tolerable patients long term.
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