A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine combined with an immunotherapy drug kept 68.8 percent of high-risk melanoma patients cancer-free after five years, compared to 49.1 percent of patients who received immunotherapy alone, according to new research presented Monday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference.
The results represent a 49 percent reduction in the risk of cancer recurrence for patients who received the combination therapy, according to NPR. The study, which followed 157 patients in Australia and the United States, was also published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Survival rates also separated significantly between the two groups. Ninety-two percent of patients who received the combination therapy were alive at the five-year mark, compared to 71 percent of those who received only Keytruda, the immunotherapy drug.
Dr. Janice Mehnert, a melanoma specialist and researcher at NYU Langone Health and senior author of the new paper, described the approach as a personalized immunotherapy strategy tailored to each patient's tumor. "This is an incredibly interesting trial because the approach is just so unique," she said. "I think this is strong evidence that this therapy, when used in combination with immunotherapy, can demonstrably reduce the risk of dying from this disease."
The vaccine uses the same messenger RNA technology that powered the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. In this application, the mRNA is used to create a vaccine specific to each patient's tumor, designed to help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells that may remain after surgery.
All 157 patients in the trial had already undergone surgery to remove their tumors before receiving treatment. They were considered at high risk of recurrence.
Mehnert said predicting when melanoma will return is difficult. "Sometimes recurrence is easily treated with surgery or radiation, but sometimes it happens in the lungs, the liver or the brain," she said, adding that the preventive approach is designed to harness the immune system early in a patient's disease course.
One of the trial participants, Connie Franciosi, was 80 years old and had been diagnosed with melanoma in 2020 following a suspicious spot on her skin. She was told after surgery that she faced a high risk of recurrence and was offered a spot in the trial.
Dr. Sarah Arron, a dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon in the San Francisco Bay Area who was not involved in the research, said the results were significant. "I think this is a landmark advance in how we treat these very advanced, high-risk melanomas," she said.
There are approximately 112,000 melanomas diagnosed in the United States each year and about 8,500 deaths.
