Vaccine for ‘silent killer’ pancreatic cancer shows promise

There’s hope for treating one of the deadliest forms of cancer. 

A pancreatic cancer vaccine has proven to be effective in half of patients treated in a small trial, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Pancreatic cancer — often called the “silent killer,” since symptoms don’t show up in most patients until it has spread to other organs — occurs when cells in the pancreas mutate and form a tumor.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York sent tumor samples from 16 patients to scientists at BioNTech in Germany, the same company Pfizer teamed up with to produce COVID-19 vaccines. 

After scientists analyzed proteins in patient’s cancer cells, they used messenger RNA — a molecule that contains instructions to direct cells to make a protein — in a vaccine for each patient, attempting to tell the immune system to attack the cancer cells.

Along with the vaccine, subjects were also given chemotherapy and a drug meant to keep tumors from combatting immune responses. 

As a result, a shocking 8 out of the 16 patients in the trial were cancer-free 18 months after treatment.

What’s more, one patient’s cancer growth in their liver went away following the vaccine, imaging tests showed.

It’s still unclear, however, how effective the vaccine alone is on the tumors as patients were also given chemo and the drug. Half of the patients treated reported the cancer returning in a year. 

“Just establishing the proof of concept that vaccines in cancer can actually do something after, I don’t know, 30 years of failure is probably not a bad thing,” Ira Mellman, vice president of cancer immunology at Genentech, the developer of the pancreatic cancer vaccine with BioNTech, told the New York Times.

“We’ll start with that.”

Costs, however, remain a barrier, since each vaccine must be customized, Dr. Neeha Zaidi, a pancreatic cancer specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told the publication.

About 64,050 people will be diagnosed with the deadly disease this year. Pancreatic cancer accounts for about 3% of all cancers in the US, and around 7% of all cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society.