Ryan Schoenfeld, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer of The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, shared on LinkedIn:
“It was great to see the news last week about the Moderna/Merck MRNA vaccine for high-risk melanoma – and it’s captured plenty of attention outside of the scientific community, too.
For those of us who followed the Phase 2 data over the last year, this latest readout wasn’t a complete surprise. Still, seeing a late-stage trial demonstrate that a personalized vaccine combined with checkpoint blockade can reduce recurrence and spread is a huge validation of the field’s direction.
Carolyn Johnson has a great write – up in The New York Times on what this means for patients (link below).
I was especially pleased to see Catherine Wu of Dana – Farber Cancer Institute quoted in this piece, since she helped kickstart this entire approach when her lab first proved that custom neoantigen vaccines could train T cells against a patient’s specific tumor.
Today, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research is proud to support Dr. Wu and her co-Principal Investigators, Nir Hacohen and Fei Chen, as they take personalized immunology even further – using spatial genomics to discover tumor-reactive TCRs and engineer next-generation T-cell therapies for challenging solid tumors like ovarian and colorectal cancer.
Learn more about their Endeavor Award:
The beauty of individualized vaccines is also why they are so difficult to engineer. You have to predict which neoantigens will actually provoke a response – an area where Benjamin Greenbaum at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has done brilliant computational work modeling neoantigen fitness and tumor evolution.
At the same time, overcoming tumor heterogeneity is critical, which is why we’ve backed Darrell Irvine’s work using vaccine boosters for CAR T therapy to induce antigen spreading so the immune system learns to target multiple tumor variants on its own.
This work represents a very different kind of vaccine – based approach to cancer immunotherapy through a unique combination strategy.
Translating blue sky concepts into clinical reality takes time, conviction, and exceptional science. Huge congratulations to the investigators and clinical teams moving this important research forward.
Link to the NY Times article by Carolyn Johnson: ”
Other articles about MRNA vaccine on OncoDaily.
You can also read:ChemRNA: A New Generation of Simplified RNA Vaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy
