• First patient gets dose of jab designed to kill most common form of lung cancer & stop it coming back

Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) lung cancer vaccine in patients.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer related death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Now, experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells and then prevents them from ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

The phase one clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has been launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the United Kingdom (UK) (England and Wales), the United States, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey.

Overall, about 130 patients – from early stage before surgery or radiotherapy, to late stage disease or recurrent cancer – will be enrolled to have the jab alongside immunotherapy. 

The jab uses mRNA, similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.

The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.

Consultant Medical Oncologist at University College London Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust (UCLH), which is leading the trial in the UK, Prof. Siow Ming Lee said: “It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them.”

Janusz Racz, 67, from London, was the first person to have the vaccine in the UK. He was diagnosed in May and soon after started chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Racz received six consecutive injections five minutes apart over 30 minutes at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility. Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.

Lee said: “We hope that adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of the time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back.” “We now know that about 20-30% of patients stay alive with stage four with immunotherapy and now we want to improve survival rates. So hopefully, this mRNA vaccine, on top of immunotherapy, might provide the extra boost. We hope to go on to phase two, phase three, and then hope it becomes the standard of care worldwide.”

(The Guardian)