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A personalized cancer vaccine could help prevent melanoma from returning after surgery. Sutter investigators Dr. Kevin Kim, oncologist and chief of precision medicine at Sutter Health, and Dr. Mohammed Kashani-Sabet, medical director of Sutter CPMC's Cancer Center, led Sutter's participation in the phase 2 KEYNOTE-942 study that helped make possible this advance.

Sutter Health investigators helped contribute to the earlier phase 2 research that established promising evidence for this personalized vaccine approach. Now, newly released results from the larger international phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial provide further evidence of its potential, showing that the personalized mRNA vaccine combined with pembrolizumab reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death at two years compared with pembrolizumab alone.

The experimental vaccine uses mRNA technology to help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells. Each vaccine is personalized using the unique genetic characteristics of an individual patient's tumor to identify tumor-specific targets, thereby enhancing the immune system's ability to recognize and eliminate cancer cells. The goal is not to guarantee that cancer will be prevented, but to reduce the risk of melanoma returning or spreading after surgery.

The phase 3 findings build on the KEYNOTE-942 study that evaluated the personalized vaccine with pembrolizumab versus pembrolizumab alone in patients whose melanoma had been surgically removed.

"What makes this approach so exciting is that we're using the unique characteristics of a patient's cancer to help their immune system recognize it," said Kim.

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