Cancer vaccines are no longer science fiction. The current moment will go down in the history of medicine as the beginning of a new phase in the fight against this disease. The first phase 1 clinical trial (in humans) has just been launched to test the BNT116 vaccine against the most common and lethal type of lung cancer: non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The vaccine, developed by BioNTech, uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology – similar to the vaccines against Covid – and works by presenting the immune system with NSCLC tumor markers to prepare the body to eliminate cancer cells that express these markers.
NSCLC is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, with nearly 1.8 million deaths per year. In Spain, the mortality rate has increased by 16% in the last 5 years. One person dies from this cause every 20 minutes. Lung cancer develops due to the abnormal growth of cells in the form of a tumor in the lungs, which are the organs responsible for carrying oxygen to the blood and removing carbon dioxide from the body. NSCLC, against which the vaccine is designed, is the most common type. Currently, only 30% of cases are detected in the early stages, when earlier diagnosis and treatment means an increase in survival of up to 80%.
For this reason, our country is among the seven in which the project has been launched (together with the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Turkey), which will be developed in 34 research centres with 130 patients (from those who are in an early phase, before surgery or radiotherapy, to those who are in an advanced phase of the disease or have frequent relapses), who will receive the vaccine together with immunotherapy.
The Spanish centres that will participate will be the Virgen de la Macarena Hospital (Seville), the Jiménez Díaz Foundation (Madrid), the La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital (Valencia), the Vall d’Hebron Hospital and the Geman Trias i Pujol Hospital in Barcelona, in addition to the university hospital complex in Santiago de Compostela.
The first patient to receive the vaccine was a 67-year-old Londoner (Janusz Racz), a scientist specialising in artificial intelligence who was diagnosed with the disease in May and shortly afterwards began chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Last Tuesday, Racz received six consecutive injections five minutes apart for 30 minutes at the Clinical Research Centre of the National Institute for Health Research (UCLH). Each dose contained different RNA strands. The process will be repeated weekly for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.
The goal of treatment is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells intact, unlike chemotherapy.
“We are now entering this exciting new era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer,” Professor Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust, which is leading the UK trial, told The Guardian. “It’s easy to administer and you can select specific antigens on the cancer cell and then target them. This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment.”
If the results of the phase 1 trial are positive, scientists hope to then move on to phases 2 and 3 and, once successful, the vaccine will become the standard of care for this type of tumor throughout the world, “and save many patients with lung cancer,” Lee said hopefully.
