An experimental vaccine offers new hope to patients with melanoma, one of the most aggressive forms of skin cancer. Pharmaceutical companies Merck and Moderna released results from a phase 3 clinical trial evaluating the effectiveness of a personalized mRNA-based vaccine that, when combined with immunotherapy, reduced the risk of disease recurrence or death by 42 percent compared to treatment with the immunotherapy drug alone.
Georgina Long, medical director of the Australian Melanoma Institute and principal investigator of the study, said in a statement that these findings are “transformative” and “have the potential to deliver a fundamental change in the way we treat patients with early-stage melanoma.”
The trial, known as INTERpath-001, included 1,137 people with high-risk melanoma who had surgery to completely remove their tumors. The participants were divided into two groups. Members of the first group received only Pembrolizumab, a drug that helps the immune system detect and fight cancer cells, while those in the second group were treated with the same drug in combination with the mRNA vaccine, called Intismeran Autogene.
After following participants for an average of 24.6 months, researchers determined that adding the vaccine reduced the risk of cancer recurrence or death by 42 percent compared to pembrolizumab alone.
The results also showed that the experimental treatment reduced the risk of the disease spreading to other parts of the body by 38%. At the end of the follow-up period, 82.2 percent of patients who received both treatments remained recurrence-free, compared to 70 percent of those who received pembrolizumab alone.
“The results of the INTerpath-001 study represent a major advance in the treatment of melanoma and, in particular, in the development of personalized medicine,” said Eva Muñoz Couselo, who leads a melanoma research group at the Vall d’Hebron Oncology Institute, in Barcelona and who was not involved in the study. SMC Spain. “For the first time, a phase III trial has demonstrated that an individualized therapeutic vaccine, designed based on the molecular characteristics of each patient’s tumor, can significantly improve the outcomes of conventional immunotherapy.
The labs explained that the vaccine was developed using a tumor sample taken from each patient, used to identify specific mutations that would create distinct proteins that the immune system could learn to recognize in order to attack cancer cells. The scientists selected up to three of these molecular signatures per patient.
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