A UK man has become one of the first to receive an experimental mRNA vaccine designed to prevent recurrence of melanoma skin cancer. Steve Young, a 52-year-old musician, had a stage II melanoma removed previously, and said the shot is his “best chance” at stopping the cancer coming back.
“I feel lucky to be part of this clinical trial,” Young said in a
The vaccine is called mRNA-4157, or sometimes V940. It’s designed to be given alongside the drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab), and results from the earlier portion of the trial showed this combo led to a 44 percent reduction in recurrence or death at 18 months following surgical removal of high-grade melanoma.
Young and the other trial participants know that they’ll be receiving Keytruda. What will remain a mystery, both to them and the medics supervising them, is whether they’re getting the real vaccine or a placebo.
These types of vaccines work by providing the body’s cells with a set of blueprints so that they can get to work making specific proteins. For COVID, these are
What makes this so exciting is that the suite of proteins can be personalized for each patient. The vaccine primes the patient’s immune system against proteins that are known to play a part in their specific cancer, while Keytruda tackles another of the cancer’s
A lot of the lessons learned during the race to develop vaccines against COVID-19 are now having a renaissance in
But they’re already playing their part in different ways. The HPV vaccine program has had
Melanoma is not the most common type of skin cancer, but according to the