In April 2010, the Food and Drug Administration approved a cancer vaccine built individually for each patient out of his own immune cells. It is called Provenge, it treats advanced prostate cancer. Sixteen years later, according to Targeted Oncology, it still has not been widely adopted.
That history is worth holding onto as the headlines announce a breakthrough. On August 19, Merck and Moderna reported that an individualized therapy called intismeran, given alongside the drug Keytruda after surgery, kept melanoma from returning longer than Keytruda alone. According to the two companies, it is the first late-stage trial of this approach to succeed.
This treatment does not prevent cancer. It is given to people who have already had a tumor cut out, and the treatments keeps the disease from coming back. Merck and Moderna call it individualized antigen therapy. Every dose is built for one person. It cannot be given to anyone else.
What it does is hand the immune system a photograph. A patient's tumor is sequenced, software selects up to 34 mutations found only in that tumor, and those are written into a single strand of mRNA. The body reads the instructions and builds the proteins itself. The immune system learns what to hunt.
The trial covered melanoma. The same therapy is in testing for lung, bladder and kidney cancer, though those answers are years off.
One caution. No figures have been published yet, and whether patients live longer is still being measured.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
