UNITED STATES – February 19, 2025 – A vaccine for pancreatic cancer! What a breakthrough for the treatment one of the most devastating cancers where fewer than 13% of people live more than five years after diagnosis. The cancer is very advanced by the time someone has any symptoms. It has spread much earlier than most cancers by the time the diagnosis is made. There are very few effective treatments. Surgery is indicated only about 20% of the time due to the quick spread of this cancer. There is no routine screening test for cancer of the pancreas.
In a recent article published in Nature, researchers from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City performed a phase 1 trial on 16 patients with pancreatic cancer that was treatable with surgery. A novel approach to treatment included the standard regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and an immunotherapy drug with the addition of a personalized mRNA vaccine based on the genetic make-up specific to the person’s tumor. Patients were followed for an average of 4 years. One-half of the patients had a longer recurrence-free survival time compared to patients who did not respond. These responders produced specialized white blood cells to fight the cancer. The median increase in survival time was more than 1 year. The study showed that the addition of the vaccine was safe and effective.
The vaccine teaches the body’s immune system to produce large numbers of specialized white blood cells to recognize, destroy and prevent the spread of cancer cells. These ‘killer’ white blood cells were not present before administration of the vaccine and were found to be present for up to 3 years after vaccination.
Precision medicine is a new non-traditional health care approach that uses a person’s unique genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors for a personalized prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. It is also known as “personalized medicine”. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration says that “the goal of precision medicine is to target the right treatments to the right patients at the right time.” Knowing a tumor’s genetic make-up may allow physicians to choose specific treatments that may extend a person’s life, improve their chances of survival and reduce the risk of side-effects from treatment.
The results of this study are encouraging, although it is an early trial. Larger trials are planned. Similar vaccines are being tested for treating people with melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, and the increasingly prevalent colorectal cancer.
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Contact: Dr. Dick Needleman, Health reporter, 103.3 AshevilleFM, healthyasheville@ashevillefm.org