Five years ago, a small group of cancer scientists meeting in a hospital restaurant in Mainz, Germany, came up with a bold plan: they would test their new cancer vaccine against one of the most dangerous forms of the disease, cancer, notorious for its consequences even for patients who have a tumor. was deleted.

Some scientists realized that the vaccine might not stop these relapses, but the patients were desperate. And the speed with which the disease often returned, pancreas cancermay work for the benefit of scientists: for better or worse, but soon they will know if the vaccine helped.

On Wednesday, scientists reported results that responded to the desperation of patients. The vaccine elicited an immune response in at least half of the treated patients, and these people did not have cancer recurrence during the study, which was found by independent experts. described as very promising.

The study, published in the journal Nature, marks a milestone in a decades-long drive to develop cancer vaccines tailored to the tumors of individual patients.

Researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, removed tumors from patients and sent their samples to Germany. There his scientists BioNTekcompany that built one very successful vaccine against COVID-19 in collaboration with Pfizer, they analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of cancer cells.

Then, using this genetic data, BioNTech scientists created personalized vaccines designed to train each patient’s immune system to attack tumors. Like BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccines, cancer vaccines were based on messenger RNA. In this case, vaccines instructed cells of patients produce some of the same proteins found in their tumors, potentially triggering an immune response that would be useful against real cancer cells.

In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to recur about 13 months after surgery. However, responding patients there were no signs of recurrence during approximately 18 months of follow-up..

“This is the first demonstrated success – and I will call it a success despite the preliminary nature of the study – of an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer,” said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a disease specialist at the University of Texas, MD Anderson. A cancer center that did not participate in the study.

“With this results model, this is a really important milestone,” he added.