Individualized cancer vaccines are on the horizon, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you have the misfortune to develop cancer, chances are good you may have a vaccine developed just for you to treat it, if further research bears out results of a recent study looking at such a vaccine to treat melanoma. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson describes the study.

Nelson: There are two groups that have been trying to make individualized vaccines and others, a different vaccine for every individual based on the defective genes that they have in their cancer. This is what they were doing when they were distracted somewhat with the COVID-19 pandemic. They did a randomized trial of folks with high risk melanoma. They got one of the immune checkpoint inhibitors, pembrolizumab, plus or minus their particular vaccine. What they saw was a reduction in the risk of recurrence that was almost 44-45%.  :33 

Nelson says the rapid development of mRNA vaccines has enabled this technology. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.