Nicholas DeVito, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Division of Medical Oncology at Duke University, shared on LinkedIn:
“I see lots of hand wringing and hot takes on why an mRNA vaccine worked in melanoma and not CRC.
The hot/cold tumor aspect isn’t even the main part of the discussion to me.
We know IFNg upregulates PDL1, causing vaccine failure after the tumor has been recognized.
Our lack of ability to appreciate of immune checkpoints is why we saw T cell responses to vaccines in studies conducted 20+ years ago, but no anti-tumor efficacy, leading us to move on to other therapies.
So the question now becomes: Why would BioNTech even bother with a monotherapy study?
I hope we learn something from their correlatives, but this is a lesson about study design and frankly Tumor Immunology 101 – not a nail in the coffin for mRNA vaccines in CRC.”
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