Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common type of pancreatic cancer, has a mortality rate of 88 percent. It is the third leading cause of death from cancer in the U.S. and is becoming more common. Surgery is the main form of treatment, but the cancer has a 90 percent recurrence rate at seven to nine months. Chemotherapy is only partially effective at delaying recurrence. Other treatments, such as immunotherapy, are mostly ineffective. But messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines—famous for their ability to prevent COVID—are starting to show some promise against the lethal cancer. In a recent early-stage trial, half of pancreatic cancer patients who received a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine after surgery did not have a recurrence of the tumor a year and a half later. The trial, which was described in a study published 5/10/23 in Nature, was small—with just 16 patients—and it will need to be replicated in larger studies.
Eight of the 16 patients generated a strong T cell response to the vaccines. At a median follow-up time of 18 months after the treatment, these individuals had longer survival, without a recurrence of their cancer.
The study was small and involved only white patients. And the therapy—which is, under the current system, expensive—does not work for everyone with pancreatic cancer. Nevertheless, experts say it is a promising development for a disease with such limited treatment options.
Read more here in the original article by Tanya Lewis!
Photo Credit: Anne Weston, EM STP, the Francis Crick Institute/ Science Source
