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A personalized melanoma vaccine, called intismeran, could mark a major advance in cancer treatment. Last week, pharmaceutical companies Merck and Moderna announced clinical trial results showing the vaccine, combined with immunotherapy, reduced the risk of cancer returning or death by 42% compared with immunotherapy alone.
Dr. Craig Slingluff, a UVA Health researcher who has spent decades developing cancer vaccines, says the findings offer new hope for helping more patients live longer and potentially curing some cancers.
He spoke with UVA Today about how the vaccine works, what it means for patients and why he is optimistic about the future of cancer treatment.
This is a significant finding in melanoma treatment and in the broader field of personalized cancer therapies. It is the first randomized trial testing a personalized mRNA vaccine for cancer that has shown meaningful and significant benefit for patients.
The side effects were very tolerable, so the data show a high benefit-to-risk ratio. The success here shows that a personalized approach built on the mRNA platform that worked so well for COVID vaccines can be successful and may well lead to similar benefits for other cancers.
The trial was designed to compare the benefit of adding the vaccine to the current standard treatment. Standard treatment after surgery for melanoma is an immunotherapy called pembrolizumab (or a similar antibody to nivolumab). Both pembrolizumab and nivolumab are antibodies to the PD-1 molecule.
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