COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines that saved 2.5 million lives worldwide during pandemic may help stimulate the immune system to fight Cancer. This is a surprising finding from a new study that… we and our colleagues published in the journal Nature.
During development mRNA vaccines for patients with brain tumors in 2016, our team led by pediatric oncologist Elias Sayurfound that mRNA can train the immune system to destroy tumors. even if the mRNA is not associated with cancer.
So we reviewed the clinical results for more than 1,000 patients with melanoma and advanced lung cancer treated with an immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This treatment is a common approach doctors use to train the immune system to fight cancer. It does this by blocking a protein that tumor cells produce to shut down immune cells, allowing the immune system to continue destroying cancer.
Notably, patients who received the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive after three years compared with those who did not receive either vaccine. Surprisingly, patients with tumors that typically respond poorly to immunotherapy also saw very significant benefits: a nearly five-fold improvement in overall three-year survival. This association between improved survival and receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine remained strong even after we controlled for factors such as disease severity and comorbidities.
To understand the underlying mechanism, we turned to animal models. We found that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines act as an alarm signal, causing the body's immune system to recognize and destroy tumor cells and overcome cancer's ability to shut down immune cells. When combined, vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors work together to unleash the full power of the immune system to kill cancer cells.
Why is this important
Immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors has revolutionized cancer treatment over the past decade, curing many patients who were previously considered incurable. However, these treatments are ineffective in patients with “cold” tumors that successfully evade immune detection.
Our results show that mRNA vaccines can provide the spark the immune system needs to turn these “cold” tumors into “hot” tumors. We hope that if this widely available and inexpensive intervention is validated in our upcoming clinical trial, it could extend the benefits of immunotherapy to millions of patients who would not otherwise benefit from this therapy.
What other research is being done?
Unlike infectious disease vaccines, which are used to prevent infection, therapeutic vaccines against cancer are used to help train the immune systems of cancer patients to better fight tumors.
We and many others I'm working hard now do personalized mRNA vaccines For cancer patients. This requires taking a small sample of a patient's tumor and using machine learning algorithms to predict which proteins in the tumor will be most effective. best targets for a vaccine. However, this approach may be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
In contrast, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines do not require personalization, are already widely available at low or no cost worldwide, and can be administered at any time during patient treatment. Our conclusions are that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have significant antitumor effects to raise hopes that they will help spread the cancer-fighting benefits of mRNA vaccines to everyone.
What's next
To achieve this goal, we are preparing to test this treatment strategy in patients in a nationwide clinical trial in people with lung cancer. People receiving an immune checkpoint inhibitor will be randomized to receive the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine while on treatment or not.
This study will tell us whether mRNA COVID-19 vaccines should be included in the standard of care for patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors. Ultimately, we hope that this approach will help many patients receiving immunotherapy, and especially those who currently have no effective treatment options.
This work is an example of how a tool emerging from a global pandemic could become a new weapon against cancer and quickly spread the benefits of existing treatments to millions of patients. By using a familiar vaccine in a new way, we hope to extend the life-saving benefits of immunotherapy to previously overlooked cancer patients.
This edited article is republished from Talk under Creative Commons license. Read original article.
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