E. Shyam P. Reddy, Professor and Director of the Cancer Biology Program at Morehouse School of Medicine, shared on LinkedIn:
“Personalized cancer vaccines recently became red hot with Merck and Moderna’s news about their melanoma vaccine’s remarkable Phase III trial results. Now, underdog BriaCell Therapeutics is hoping to catch that wave, and the company is in a good position to do so. With a technology distinct from Merck and Moderna’s mRNA approach, breast cancer and prostate products close to market, and its melanoma vaccine program advancing, BriaCell is making its move.
‘What we are doing is developing a personalized but off-the-shelf cellular immunotherapy for cancer,’
William V. Williams, told Inside Precision Medicine. Williams is president and chief executive officer of BriaCell
This Monday, BriaCell announced that Bria-MEL+, its personalized whole cell melanoma immunotherapy vaccine candidate, has achieved a ‘key genetic engineering milestone, advancing the program toward clinical development.’
The American Cancer Society estimates that approximately 112,000 new cases of melanomas will be diagnosed in the United States in 2026, including about 65,400 in men and 46,600 in women. Based on 2021–2023 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data, approximately 2.2% of men and women will be diagnosed with skin melanoma during their lifetime. Melanoma accounts for only about one percent of skin cancers but causes a large majority of skin cancer deaths.
Bria-MEL+ is a cell-based therapeutic cancer vaccine designed to harness a patient’s own immune system to combat melanoma. The program is personalized yet ‘off-the-shelf’: a simple patient saliva test will determine which of the several premanufactured treatment cell lines will be selected for personalized treatment, avoiding the need to manufacture a unique product for each individual patient.”
This also can be interesting: INTerpath-001 Trial: Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccine for Melanoma
