A revolutionary new cancer treatment known as mRNA therapy has been administered to patients at Hammersmith Hospital in West London. The trial was set up to evaluate the therapy’s safety and effectiveness in the treatment of melanoma, lung cancer and other solid tumors.
The new treatment uses genetic material known as messenger RNA – or mRNA – and works by presenting common markers of tumors to the patient’s immune system.
The goal is to help it recognize and fight cancer cells that express those markers.
“New mRNA-based cancer immunotherapies offer a way to recruit the patient’s own immune system to fight their cancer,” said Dr David Pinato of Imperial College London, an investigator with the trial’s UK arm.
Pinato said this research was still in its early stages and could take years before it becomes available to patients. However, the new trial laid important groundwork that could help develop less toxic and more precise new anticancer therapies. “We desperately need this to turn the tide on cancer,” he added.
A number of cancer vaccines have recently entered clinical trials around the world. These fall into two categories: personalized cancer immunotherapies, which rely on extracting a patient’s own genetic material from their tumors; and therapeutic cancer immunotherapies, such as the mRNA therapy newly launched in London, which are “tailor-made” and tailored to a specific type of cancer.
The primary goal of the new trial – known as Mobilize – is to discover whether this particular type of mRNA therapy is safe and tolerated by patients with lung or skin cancer and can shrink tumors. It will be administered alone in some cases and in other cases in combination with the existing cancer drug pembrolizumab.
Researchers say that while the experimental therapy is still in the early stages of testing, they hope it could eventually lead to a new treatment option for hard-to-treat cancers, should the approach be proven to be safe and effective.
Almost one in two people in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. A range of therapies have been developed to treat patients, including chemotherapy and immune therapies.
However, cancer cells can become resistant to drugs, making tumors more difficult to treat, and scientists are eager to find new approaches to tackling cancers.
Preclinical tests in both cell and animal models of cancer provided evidence that new mRNA therapy had an effect on the immune system and could be offered to patients in early-phase clinical trials.
