Moderna says the same mRNA technology that fueled its COVID-19 vaccine is proving effective in fighting melanoma.
The company presented the latest results from its trial involving 157 people with advanced skin cancer at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. In the study, Moderna and Merck combined their cancer treatments—Moderna’s experimental cancer vaccine and Merck’s approved checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda)—to achieve potentially life-changing results for melanoma patients.
In the phase 2 study of patients with stage 3 or stage 4 melanoma who were treated after surgery to remove the bulk of their tumors, two thirds received a monthly dose of Moderna’s cancer vaccine for nine months, along with pembrolizumab treatments every three weeks for a year. The remaining one third received pembrolizumab alone.
After about three years, those who had received the two treatments had a 49% lower risk of cancer recurrence or death, and a 62% lower risk of their cancer spreading, compared to people who got only pembrolizumab. Overall, 75% of the patients taking the two therapies survived with no recurrences at 2.5 years, compared to 56% of those on pembrolizumab.
“Across all measures of efficacy, we are starting to see significant and durable responses,” says Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna. “This is a dramatic impact on melanoma.”
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The cancer vaccine relies on the same mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine, a molecular plug-and-play platform that makes it possible to swap out genetic information coding for different proteins that can be created relatively quickly. Each of the treated patients received a custom-made vaccine, which took six to eight weeks to develop, that was tailored to the specific mutations in their tumor. “The results give us an extremely high degree of confidence that this effect is real and very long lasting,” says…
