The German company BioNTech, which produces the COVID-19 vaccine, has achieved promising results against pancreatic cancer thanks to a personalized vaccine it has developed. The vaccine, which teaches patients’ immune systems to attack cancer tumors, induced an immune response in half of the 16 treated patients, whose cancers did not relapse during the study.

Vaccine developed for pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer is famous for its frequent recurrences among cancer types. Even if tumor cells are removed, it has been observed many times that pancreatic cancer relapses. However, a new vaccine developed against this cancer is very promising. The study, published in the journal Nature, marked a turning point in the decades-long movement to tailor cancer vaccines to patients’ tumors.

At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Dr. Researchers led by Vinod Balachandran removed the patients’ tumors and sent their samples to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, which made a highly successful COVID vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of cancer cells.

BioNTech then used this genetic data to create personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient’s immune system to attack tumors. Like BioNTech’s COVID vaccines, cancer vaccines are based on RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients’ cells to produce some of the same proteins found in their removed tumors, triggering an immune response that would potentially work against real cancer cells.

“This is a milestone.”

D., a disease specialist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. “This is the first demonstrable success of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer, and despite the preliminary nature of the study, I would call it a success. By these standards, the new vaccine is a milestone,” Anirban Maitra said in a statement. used the phrases. Although the scale of the study was limited to only 16 patients, the results are quite encouraging.

Of course, there is still a long way to go. The cost of personalized mRNA vaccines is a major barrier to wider use of such vaccines. But experts say it’s a promising sign that scientists are able to create, quality check, and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly.

$100,000 each

One of the founding partners of the company involved in the study, Dr. Uğur Şahin said that since the beginning of the study in December 2019, BioNTech has reduced the vaccine production process to less than six weeks, and ultimately they aim to produce cancer vaccines within four weeks. Şahin noted that since BioNTech began testing vaccines nearly a decade ago, it has automated parts of production, reducing the cost from about $350,000 per dose to less than $100,000.

Meanwhile, in patients who did not respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return about 13 months after surgery. Responding patients showed no signs of recurrence during the approximately 18 months of follow-up. Interestingly, one patient had evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response after an unusual enlargement of the liver developed. The growth was later lost on imaging tests. Scientists now aim to try this technique in other types of cancer and improve existing solutions.