BioNTech's MRNA Vaccine Shows Promise in Combating Pancreatic Cancer

Highlights:

BioNTech's mRNA vaccine demonstrates safety and elicits an immune response in early-stage pancreatic cancer
Promising results offer hope for improved treatment options against this deadly disease
Larger trials are needed to confirm the vaccine's efficacy and address response variability in participants

In a short experiment, a new pancreatic cancer vaccine based on mRNA technology was found to be safe and capable of eliciting an immune response - tremendously hopeful news in the fight against this particularly lethal illness ().

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‘Promising news in pancreatic cancer research: BioNTech's mRNA vaccine shows safety & immune response in the early-stage study, offering hope for improved treatments. Larger trials are needed for further validation. #PancreaticCancer #MedicalResearch #BioNTech ’

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Exploring the Challenges of Checkpoint Inhibitors in Pancreatic Cancer

On the surface of T cells in the immune system are molecules known as "checkpoint proteins," which detect proteins on the surfaces of healthy cells. This instructs the immune system not to assault the cell since it is a friend, not a threat. Some malignancies exploit this mechanism by producing proteins that convince T cells that they are harmless, allowing the disease to spread unchecked. Drugs known as "immune checkpoint inhibitors" disrupt the checkpoint proteins, effectively slowing down the immune system.

That is, T cells no longer regard cancer cells as buddies, but they also do not regard them as enemies. That requires T cells to see anything that alerts them to the fact that the cancer cell is harmful and should be attacked. This warning signal is frequently a neoantigen, which is a sort of altered protein that exclusively appears on the surface of cancer cells. However, pancreatic tumors may not express as many neoantigens as other malignancies, which could explain why checkpoint inhibitors aren't as successful against pancreatic cancer, which is exceedingly lethal and difficult to treat.

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Revolutionizing Pancreatic Cancer Treatment with BioNTech's mRNA Vaccine

BioNTech, a German pharmaceutical company that collaborated with Pfizer to develop one of the first effective COVID-19 vaccines, has now tested an mRNA vaccine to assist the immune system fight pancreatic cancer when paired with a checkpoint inhibitor – and it showed amazing promise in this tiny research.

"This is the first demonstrable success - and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study - of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," Anirban Maitra, a pancreatic cancer specialist at the University of Texas, told the New York Times. "By that standard, it's a milestone."

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Tailored Vaccine and Checkpoint Inhibitor Combo Shows Promise in Early-Stage Pancreatic Cancer Study

During the study, 16 persons with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common kind of pancreatic cancer, had their tumors surgically removed and evaluated. The immune system was then trained to detect up to 20 neoantigens identified in their tumor cells using a tailored pancreatic cancer vaccine.

Participants were given the checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab about nine weeks after surgery before receiving their tailored vaccine intravenously. They began a six-month chemotherapy course four weeks later before receiving another vaccination dosage. Eight of the sixteen participants had T cells capable of identifying cancer neoantigens in their blood after the initial immunization, and four patients had T cells for multiple neoantigens. Chemotherapy can impair the immune system, however, these T cells were not affected.

None of the eight persons who reacted to the pancreatic cancer vaccine showed symptoms of cancer recurrence 18 months following surgery. Recurrence occurred at a median of 13.4 months among people who did not respond to the vaccine, and only two non-responders had their cancer return at all during the research. According to BioNTech's paper, over 80% of pancreatic cancer patients experience recurrence 14 months following surgery and chemotherapy.

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BioNTech's Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine: Promising Results in Safety Trial, Larger Efficacy Trials Needed

The trial's side effects were limited, with only one person having "severe" fever and hypertension. The experiment indicates that BioNTech's pancreatic cancer vaccine is safe, but larger trials are required to confirm its efficacy.

While the remission data was encouraging, this experiment was only intended to investigate the vaccine's safety and if it elicited an immune response, not its efficacy against cancer recurrence. We can't say how much the vaccine extended cancer remission because there wasn't a control group that merely received the checkpoint inhibitor.

Larger efficacy trials could also look at why the tailored vaccine only worked in half of the participants. Those who did not respond showed a lower diversity of tumor neoantigens, which could have played a role. It's also plausible that removing some patients' spleens with their tumors impaired the vaccine's potency.

If the BioNTech team can figure out why, they may be able to adjust the mRNA vaccine to function in a larger percentage of pancreatic cancer patients, giving people fighting the fatal disease new hope.

Reference:

Personalized RNA neoantigen vaccines stimulate T cells in pancreatic cancer - (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06063-y.epdf)

Source-Medindia