Are cancer vaccines possible?
While mRNA vaccines are helping vaccinate against Covid-19, and potentially other infectious diseases, data from clinical trials have shown that mRNA vaccines have the potential to be useful in working with non-infectious diseases, and in particular cancers. When it comes to treating cancers, one of the biggest hurdles is in fighting against a body’s own cells. Because cancer cells are mutated versions of normal body cells, and not a foreign body; it can become hard to target them. Thus typical treatments may involve surgery or chemotherapy to excise tumours as a whole. While targeted therapies do exist to treat cancer cells on a more specific level (as we have written about before), these typically play a role in increasing life expectancy, and not unfortunately preventing the cancer from growing or recurring for too long.
These vaccines work similarly to regular vaccines, in that they present a non-harmful form of the cancer that the immune system can recognize and then produce antibodies again. In the case of cancer vaccines (here we mean as a form of immunotherapy treatment, and not as immunization such as in the case of the HPV vaccine) specific antigens — depending on the cancer being targeted — are administered to the body to induce a tumour-specific B-cell response.
Recent studies have been conducted to determine whether mRNA vaccines could be used to slow the progress and development of recurrent cancers. Preclinical studies have shown promising results, such as a 2012 study in which mice that were given mRNA vaccines had a significant delay in tumour growth. Human trials are currently underway, and seem to show promising results. For instance, BioNTech is currently in Phase II clinical trials for an mRNA-based therapy called BNT111 with a monoclonal antibody in late-stage patients with refractory melanomas.
mRNA vaccines may prove integral in our battle against cancer as we are able to more precisely target and attack these cancers, and are definitely a space to watch out for
References and Further Reading:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243#Tab3
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33858437/
- https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/first-patient-dosed-in-biontech-phase-ii-trial-of-mrna-cancer-vaccine/
- https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT04526899
- Siddhartha Mukherjee says mRNA technology provides new path to inciting immune system against cancer