Of Lisa Jarvis*

A study published last month in Nature highlights the capabilities of a new personalized vaccine for cancer of the pancreas that prevents the recurrence of the disease. The test was small, just 16 patients, but it causes a feeling that is usually not associated with this brutal disease: hope.

Pancreatic cancer is famous for the speed with which it kills. Therefore, when researchers offer data suggesting that a personalized vaccine can be able to keep cancer away for years, it is worth paying attention – even if the results are a few people.

It should also be a call for action. Progress was very slow for this group of patients and their families. They deserve better choices. The only way to get there is to continue investing in the kind of research that, through decades of painful work, becomes the basis for revolutionary discoveries.

Even with the slow and steady progress of the last decade in improving survival rates, only 13% of people are alive five years after the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This poor prognosis has made this type of cancer in the third most deadly cancer in the US after lung and colon cancer.

Finding better therapies was extremely difficult. People usually do not have symptoms and there are no simple tests for the disease. Until it is identified, it has usually spread to nearby organs – a point where even the best treatments, if they existed, would make their success unlikely.

This new round of data is a mRNA vaccine – as in Covid vaccines. The idea is to learn the immune system to recognize and destroy these pieces of volume whenever they meet them.

The idea may sound simple, but until data from this small test began to emerge, few expected that the immune system could turn against pancreas cancer. Vaccines usually work better when a tumor is full of mutations, such as in melanoma, where Moderna’s personalized MRNA vaccine has made promises.

This is what made the previous data in this study so impressive: the vaccine rejuvenated the immune response against this usually hard tumor to half of the 16 participants.

But the researchers did not know whether the cancer-centers and T-cells (T-cells), which were created by the vaccine, would remain and, even if they remained, if they would continue to do their job.

Now, we know that these immune cells can last for years, for some people, perhaps staying for their entire lives. Even better, they seem to maintain the functions that are believed to be necessary to prevent relapse, says Vinod Balachandran, a pancreas cancer surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who led the study. Only two of the eight patients with a strong T-Cells response saw their cancer reappear. (The disease returned to seven of the eight people whose immune system did not respond to the vaccine).

The approach has its limits. In order to prepare the vaccine on custom, doctors must determine a sample of the patient’s tumor, but only about 20% of pancreatic cancer patients are eligible for surgery.

Barbara Brigham, a grandmother whose doctors found pancreatic cancer in September 2020, is one of the lucky ones experiencing a long -running vaccine response. The usual tests have not shown any signs of her cancer since she completed treatment with personalized vaccine and chemotherapy in the fall of 2021. This allowed her to live in college graduates, to attend her granddaughter’s marriage and to witness her. All this is “things I didn’t think I would live,” Brigham said.

And while it is still monitored every six months for signs that cancer returns, it has begun to fulfill some goals of her life. She always wanted to take a cruise to the Rhine to visit her family’s home in Germany and believes that 2026 is her year.

Of course, many more questions must be answered before the vaccine is ready for wide use. Patients are now enrolled in a larger study that will help researchers better understand the mechanism of immune response. The crucial is that this study should tell us if the vaccine does a better job than conventional chemotherapy in preventing cancer reappearance.

However, this initial success against such a durable volume has wider consequences for the use of personalized MRNA vaccines to treat other common tumors that have so far been resistant to other types of immunotherapy, Balachandran says.

Promoting this project with the urgent character it deserves will require coordinated efforts and significant investments by governments, biotechnology and charity companies. However, given the current environment at the National Institutes of Health, it is difficult not to worry that dynamics could be lost.

It would be a great failure. This cancer has deprived so many of so many families. If more people can benefit, we need to move as quickly as possible to make use of this opportunity.

Lisa Jarvis is a column of the Bloomberg Opinion column and covers issues of biotechnology, health care and pharmaceutical industry.