A new era of cancer treatment seems to have begun in earnest. Merck and Moderna’s personalized therapeutic vaccine for high risk melanoma is working as intended and keeping people cancer-free years later, trial data released this week has shown.
On Thursday, the pharmaceutical companies released the full promising Phase III results of their mRNA-based vaccine, named intismeran autogene. People given intismeran in combination with a standard immunotherapy drug were substantially less likely to have their cancer return two years later and are possibly living longer than those only given the drug, researchers found. Though longer-term data is still being collected, intismeran appears set to become the first next-generation cancer vaccine to garner regulatory approval in the near future.
These results will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine, meaning they will undergo the typical peer-review process, and will be presented over the weekend at a cancer conference. However, the companies reportedly decided to release their findings ahead of schedule after a third party seemingly broke the embargo and leaked the data early.
Vaccines are usually preventative—helping the body recognize threats like viruses before they arrive. Cancer vaccines, on the other hand, are typically therapeutic, meaning they’re intended to prevent future recurrences of a previously treated cancer. These vaccines, like intismeran, are often personalized to someone’s specific tumors.
Intismeran is specifically designed to train the body’s immune system to recognize up to 34 different neoantigens, the distinct proteins that cancer cells produce as they mutate. This newest double-blinded and randomized trial, codenamed INTerpath-001, involved 1,137 patients with high-risk melanomas (stages 2B to 4) that were likely to recur.
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