Personalized Vaccine, Immunotherapy Drug Keep Patients With Melanoma Cancer Free for Over a Year [Study]

A new potential treatment for melanoma- a type of skin cancer - shows promising results. A study found that patients remained cancer-free nearly two years later using vaccines.

New Melanoma Treatment

A study of about 150 people who had surgery for melanoma showed that personalized vaccines and immunotherapy drugs were effective in keeping patients cancer free 18 months later compared to those who did not receive the vaccine, Science.org reported.

The findings presented today at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting provides the first concrete proof that vaccination made to target tumor-specific mutations can stop a tumor from regrowing. That would be a turning point for the field of cancer vaccines, which has been unable to demonstrate success for decades.

It might also add to the growing list of immunotherapies that use the immune system to treat cancer. Patrick Ott of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who works on related vaccinations, said he was excited when he saw the data.

Despite the study's small size, the new trial is "a very exciting first step," according to cancer vaccine researcher Nina Bhardwaj of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Cancer vaccines expose T cells in the immune system to a protein, or antigen, that protrudes from a cancer cell to train them to fight a tumor. However, because the same antigens discovered on tumors also occur on normal cells, the majority of vaccines haven't been very effective yet.

As the cost of DNA sequencing decreased in the early 2010s, several researchers started sequencing the mutations present in a patient's tumor. They then developed a vaccine to give a small number of the corresponding mutant proteins, known as neoantigens, only current in the tumor cells. In patients with solid tumors, including melanoma, colon, lung, and brain cancers, neoantigen vaccinations can boost vaccine-specific T cells, according to a number of modest trials Ott's team and others have published since 2015. Additionally, it can curb cancer growth, at least in melanoma.

ALSO READ: First Human Trials for Cancer Pill as Potential Cure for Epilepsy To Begin in Australia in October

How Effective Are Personalized Vaccines?

The businesses caused a stir in December 2022 when they revealed that individuals who received the vaccine had a 44% lower risk of passing away or experiencing a recurrence of their cancer, Fierce Biotech reported. Academic partners provided further information at the AACR meeting: Eighty-four of the 107 patients, or 79%, were still in remission after 18 months, as opposed to only 31 of the 50 patients (62%) who received the checkpoint inhibitor alone.

According to Jeffrey Weber, the trial's chief investigator at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center, these statistics provide a very positive signal.

The fact that the vaccination worked regardless of how many mutations the patient's melanoma tumor possessed is also encouraging, indicating that it might also be effective against cancers with fewer mutations.

Such malignancies are more likely to resist immunotherapy treatments because they are less distinct from normal cells. Confirming these findings and determining whether the vaccination lengthens patients' lives are the goals of a larger trial that will begin later this year, which could persuade authorities to authorize the vaccine.

According to immunotherapy researcher Suzanne Topalian of Johns Hopkins University, these are currently fascinating preliminary findings. Like other researchers, she is interested in learning more details, such as proof that patients who recovered produced T cells specific to the neoantigens rather than simply receiving an immunological boost from the vaccine's nanoparticles.

Weber added that the data would be included in papers the team submits to journals.