Could mRNA vaccines hold the key to building an affordable universal cancer vaccine?

“I believe in the concept of a universal cancer vaccine,” said Elias Sayour, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Florida. “I think if this fails in a prospective phase III trial, I still believe we can engineer a vaccine that works prospectively.”

The cover story of last week’s issue of The Cancer Letter was about the potential of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to improve response to checkpoint inhibitor therapies in patients with lung cancer and melanoma. The finding was published by Sayour and his colleagues in an October Nature paper.

This week on The Cancer Letter Podcast, Sayour joins The Cancer Letter team to talk about his study and why he is a believer in the promise of mRNA vaccines to help improve cancer treatment.

“mRNA seems the best at doing this,” Sayour said. “That isn't to say that other vaccines couldn't harness the antiviral response in a similar manner… All I can tell you is in our preclinical models and in our observations, clinical observations as well, we did look at the Pneumovax [a non mRNA-vaccine] as just an example, a vaccine, and it did not confer the same effects as the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. Based on that, mRNA to us seems to be very unique. But other vaccine designs that leverage these mechanisms through a non-specific manner could also perhaps achieve the same effects.”

Sayour is hopeful that the COVID vaccine will show clinical benefit in the prospective phase II-III trial that is scheduled to begin enrollment in March, since it would be a boon for patients.

“If it works, I do think that's revolutionary,” Sayour said. “How commercially available it is, how this can address third-world countries that may have poor access to some of these technologies as a manner of eliciting some type of a universal effect.”

If the COVID vaccine does not help cancer patients in the prospective trial, Sayour said he will continue his work. He sees a future where all cancer patients receive some sort of universal cancer vaccine to reawaken their immune systems to help kill cancer cells.

“It's my hope that now we could have something that's instantly available to patients at the time of diagnosis, perhaps right before surgery,” Sayour said. “Everybody gets a universal vaccine to basically awaken that immune response against their cancer. And that could be bookended with immune checkpoint inhibitors, other cancer vaccines, other types of immunotherapies, for maximal effect.”

This episode is sponsored by City of Hope Cancer Center. Learn more at cityofhope.org.

Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
A planned randomized trial will ask an intriguing question: Do COVID vaccines potentiate checkpoint inhibitors?
How a Montefiore Einstein screening program is changing the history of lung cancer in the Bronx
MSK’s AML researcher Bayard “Barney” Clarkson, former president of ASCO and AACR, dies at 99
Paul Engstrom, Fox Chase pioneer of cancer prevention, dies at 89
Patient advocate David Mitchell, 75, dies of multiple myeloma
NIH agrees to review hundreds of denied or shelved grant applications
House passes three-year extension of ACA subsidies with bipartisan support

A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/202...