Hope rises as pancreatic cancer vaccine shows promise in small trial

A pancreatic cancer vaccine in its first phase of trial has shown encouraging outcomes.

The results were published on Wednesday in Nature, a scientific journal.

Out of 16 trial participants who had previously undergone surgery to remove their tumour, eight responded to the vaccine by developing T cells which taught their immune systems how to recognise and fight off cancer growth.

None of those eight has seen their cancer return, according to the findings.

Among the eight patients who did not respond adequately to the vaccine, just two have not seen their cancer return.

The treatment is a personalised messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine — famous for its ability to prevent COVID — by BioNTech.

Vinod Balachandran, a cancer surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who led the study, said the results were promising and that plans were underway to upscale tests.

“I think it’s definitely very encouraging to see that [an immune] response correlates with recurrence-free survival,” the surgeon said.

“However, it is a small study with only 16 patients in phase one. So it is a correlation. It’s not causation. We do have to test causation in a larger clinical trial.”

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal kinds of cancer, fatal in 88 percent of patients. It is also one of the hardest to treat. 

Tumours can be surgically removed, but they come back within seven to nine months in 90 percent of patients. 

Chemotherapy can help prolong life, but it too is rarely a cure. Radiation, immunotherapy and targeted therapies have also yielded no success.

The trial focused on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which accounts for more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancer cases. Only about 10 percent of PDAC patients are alive within two years of diagnosis.