Two drug companies announced Wednesday that an experimental mRNA-based vaccine has shown promising results in preventing the return of melanoma in patients who have had surgery to remove cancerous tissue.
A late-stage study tested the personalized vaccine intismeran, which was developed by Moderna, in combination with Merck’s cancer immunotherapy drug Keytruda, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The companies said the treatment extended the time before cancer returns and helped prevent the cancer from spreading. The companies said details on this results will be released later this year.
“I have a feeling that this is just the beginning of a new field,” Jane Healy, the vice president of oncology at Merck, said.
The results are the first successful late-stage trial for a personalized mRNA cancer treatment.
“I think this is really an important achievement,” Jedd Wolchok, the director of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and an immunotherapy pioneer, said, according to the website Stat.
“It tells us what might have been considered science fiction 15 or 20 years ago — that we can produce a personalized vaccine based on sequencing from a tumor from a pathology specimen — could be used to delay progression of melanoma.
“It really establishes personalized cancer vaccines as being a new addition to standard cancer therapy.”
“While we need to await the final results, this early report is certainly promising and builds on the encouraging results that have been observed across smaller studies over the past decade,” said Catherine Wu, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “It is highly conceivable that this treatment paradigm will be extendable to other cancers as well.”
Aside from its impact on patients, the results were a shot in the arm for the drug companies, as noted by CNBC.
Merck’s share price rose more than 8 percent while Moderna’s rose about 90 percent. Moderna’s stock soared during the pandemic and crashed afterward, making this treatment its chance to enter the $240-plus-billion cancer-drug market.
“We are now an oncology company,” Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel said, according to the Journal. “By Christmas, you could have a company that’s going back into sales growth for the first time in four years.”
Melanoma patients are “stuck having to deal with the new gravity of that diagnosis and then undergo uncomfortable treatments like surgery, and after that, they’re worried about their cancer coming back,” Merck’s Healy said.
Now, they can have a personalized treatment, she said, noting that because every tumor has a unique array of mutations, the personalized vaccine targets those so that the body’s immune system will attack the cancer, calling the development “very exciting.”
“We think [the results are] very meaningful for patients with this disease and really the potential of what it can mean for other patients for cancer in future trials with this particular new class of therapy,” she said.
Healy said the companies have been working on the cancer venture since 2016, according to State.
“It’s an algorithm as much as it is a therapy,” Healy said.
“I thought the chances that this is going to work are actually pretty small,” Roger Perlmutter, who led Merck’s research team from 2011 to 2020 said last year. “And there were a variety of fundamental immunological reasons why I thought that was true, but I thought it was important to be tested.”
“Today’s results represent a landmark moment for adjuvant melanoma treatment,” Professor Georgina Long, the study’s principal investigator and medical director of Melanoma Institute Australia, Chair of Melanoma Medical Oncology and Translational Research at the University of Sydney said, according to a release posted on Merck’s website.
“By intervening earlier in the course of disease, when many cancers are considered most treatable, the goal of adjuvant therapy given after surgery is to increase the possibility of cure for more patients,” Dr. Dean Y. Li, president of Merck Research Laboratories, said.
