CALIFORNIA, USA — Moderna and Merck recently announced promising results on an mRNA vaccine used to treat melanoma. In phase two of its trial, It found a 44% reduction in the cause of death and reoccurrence when it was given alongside the drug Keytruda. The trial now moves into phase three.
ABC10 health expert Dr. Payal Kohli shared her insight on the future of cancer immunotherapy. She said cancer is hard to fight because it's microscopic.
"When we give chemotherapy, we're giving poison to all the cells in our body — normal and cancerous, and so we can have a lot of adverse effects, and similarly with radiation, you can only target the cancer that you see. We can't necessarily target microscopic cancer with radiation therapy, so cancer immunotherapy, as it's called, is really an exploding field, and there are so many great advances that have been made," Kohli said.
She said these vaccines could have the potential to help prevent cancer in the future.
"Where you inject somebody with genetic code of that specific cancer that they have so that their immune system says this is a foreign, genetic material, let me mount an antibody and T&B cell response to this, and then it goes and starts attacking the cancer," Kohli said. "This is one of the first times that a messenger RNA is being used in this type of setting, and I think COVID has really opened the door for these messenger RNA vaccines to become commonplace," Kohli said.
We've seen that with other infectious diseases like the flu, and a vaccine in the works for RSV, but Kohli says it could one day be used for cancer and solid tumors in combination with other types of treatments. Scientists would already have the footprint of cancer, and they could, in theory, design the vaccines to do what they need to prevent reoccurrence.
Find out more about cancer vaccines HERE.
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