There will soon be an mRNA vaccine to prevent cancer

The mRNA vaccine to prevent melanoma is expected to launch in 2025, after being approved by US and European regulators .

Recently, the US and European drug regulatory agencies respectively approved mRNA therapy (mRNA-4157) combined with the cancer drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) for adjuvant treatment of melanoma patients.

Previously, two pharmaceutical companies Merk and Moderna showed promising results from a randomized, phase 2b clinical study. The trial was performed on patients with high-risk melanoma recurrence (stage III/IV) after complete tumor resection.

The results showed that treatment with mRNA-4157 combined with pembrolizumab improved patient survival, reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49%, and the risk of metastasis by 62% compared to using pembrolizumab alone.

"This is the first demonstration of the effectiveness of an mRNA-based cancer treatment," said Kyle Holen, senior vice president at Moderna, adding that the vaccine could be available in 2025.

Vaccine test tube at Moderna's laboratory. (Photo: Bloomberg).

The combination treatment results in fewer side effects than Keytruda alone . Patients often experience fatigue, pain at the injection site, and body chills.

Based on that data, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recognized mRNA-4157 and Keytruda as breakthrough therapies in the Priority Medicine Program, for Melanoma patients are prone to relapse.

mRNA cancer vaccines are different from regular vaccines. The focus of vaccines is not on prevention, but rather on being used as personalized medicine, to train the patient's immune system to fight cancer . To get a dose of vaccine, experts will take samples of the patient's tumor and healthy tissue, sequence the DNA and RNA, compare different levels to identify mutations, and use them as antigens for the vaccine.

Explaining more about the mechanism of vaccine action, the American Institute for Cancer Research said that through vaccines, researchers try to create an immune response against abnormal proteins of cancer cells. However, these proteins do not appear on normal cells and are not the same between people, so vaccines need to be specially prepared. From there, the immune system learns how to recognize cancer cells differently from the rest of the body.

Moderna is not the only company aiming to develop a cancer vaccine. In May 2023, BioNTech collaborated with Merck to propose a phase one clinical trial of a pancreatic cancer vaccine. In June, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, Transgene presented conclusions related to a viral vector vaccine to prevent head and neck cancer. In September, Ose Immunotherapeutics attracted attention with its vaccine to treat late-stage lung cancer.