STAT+: After a cancer vaccine’s first success, the race is on to expand the impact — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Intismeran reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 42% when combined with Keytruda versus Keytruda alone in a pivotal trial of cancer patients.
- Merck and Moderna’s trial was the first pivotal study to show that a customized mRNA treatment improved outcomes for cancer patients, and it was presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Madrid.
- European Society for Medical Oncology meeting discussions quickly turned toward how melanoma specialists should adopt intismeran and how widely the novel vaccines can be deployed.
- James Larkin of Royal Marsden Hospital, the meeting’s scientific co-chair, said the customized approach was applicable in principle to other types of tumors.
- Vinod Balachandran of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center called cancer-vaccine development’s history “long and sordid” and said prior attempts had amounted to essentially 100 years of failure.
Why it matters: For patients and melanoma specialists, intismeran’s 42% reduction in recurrence or death when added to Keytruda turns a century-long failure story into an adoption question. The meeting’s focus then broadened to how widely the customized approach can be deployed, with other tumor types explicitly raised.
Ask SkimNews
