Today melanoma, tomorrow the entire cancer world.
That’s what pharma giants Merck and Moderna are saying following their development of a personalized cancer vaccine that prevents the spread of melanoma and could open a path for the development of drug therapies to treat a variety of cancer tumors, according to a report by Reuters.
Merck and Moderna announced Wednesday their vaccine helped prevent a recurrence and spread of melanoma, a type of skin cancer, in a clinical trial of over 1,000 patients.
They said personalized cancer vaccines train the human immune system to target mutations found on a tumor.
The vaccine is an alternative to chemotherapy, which kills both healthy and cancerous cells, and immunotherapy, which recharges the immune system.
All the patients in the clinical trial had localized tumors that had been removed surgically but had a high risk of recurrence.
Melanoma is just the beginning as personalized cancer vaccines are in development for many types of tumors.
“It is a big deal for the field in general,” said Dr. Ryan Sullivan, director of the Center for Melanoma at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, in the article. “With this positive study, there is hope (and likely investment to follow) that these approaches may change the way we treat cancer more broadly.”
