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Doctors have begun testing the world’s first lung cancer vaccine using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology on patients, with experts hailing it as having the “revolutionary” potential to save thousands of lives, The Guardian reported.
Lung cancer is the most common cause of death worldwide, killing around 1.8 million people each year. Survival rates are particularly low for patients with advanced disease, when tumours have spread. Now, experts are testing a new injection that trains the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells, then prevent them from returning. The vaccine, called BNT116 and produced by BioNTech, is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease. The Phase 1 clinical trial, the first human trial of BNT116, was launched at 34 research centres in seven countries: the UK, the US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey. In total, 130 patients – from those in the early stages of the disease before surgery or radiotherapy, to those in the later stages of the disease or whose cancer has returned – are enrolled to receive the vaccine and immunotherapy. There are six centres in the UK, across England and Wales, with the first UK patient receiving the first dose of the vaccine on Tuesday.
Advantages of mRNA over chemotherapy The injection uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to the Covid-19 vaccine, to stimulate the body to fight cancer cells with NSCLC’s tumour markers by presenting them to the immune system. Unlike chemotherapy, the goal is to boost a person’s immune response to cancer without affecting healthy cells. “We are now entering a very exciting new era of clinical trials of mRNA-based immunotherapies to investigate treatments for lung cancer,” said Professor Siow Ming Lee, consultant medical oncologist leading the UK trial. “It’s simple to administer, you can select specific antigens from cancer cells and then target them. This technology is the next big step in cancer treatment”, the expert said. Janusz Racz, 67, from London, was the first person in the UK to receive the vaccine. He was diagnosed in May and started chemotherapy and radiotherapy shortly afterwards. A researcher specialising in artificial intelligence, he said his career inspired him to take part in the study. “As a scientist myself, I know that progress in science – and especially in medicine – lies in people agreeing to take part in research like this,” he said. “This is extremely rewarding for me because this is a new approach that is not available to other patients and can help me get rid of cancer. Also, I can be part of the team that provides proof of concept for this new approach, and the faster it is implemented around the world, the more lives will be saved,” he said.
On Tuesday, Raz received six consecutive injections, five minutes apart over a 30-minute period. Each injection contains a different RNA sequence. He will receive the vaccine weekly for six weeks, then every three weeks for 54 weeks. “We’re hoping that adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer from coming back because a lot of times for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, the cancer will come back,” said Dr. Lee. “I’ve been working on lung cancer for 40 years. When I started in the 1990s, no one believed that chemotherapy worked. We now know that about 20-30% of (patients) survive stage 4 with immunotherapy, and now we’re hoping to increase that survival rate. So the hope is that this mRNA vaccine will provide that extra boost. We hope to get to phase 2, phase 3, and then hopefully it will become the standard of care around the world and save a lot of lung cancer patients,” the researcher said.
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