First lung cancer vaccine given to patient in international trial

A 67-year-old lung cancer patient from London has been the first recipient of a new investigational cancer vaccine at the National Health Service (NHS) University College London Hospitals (UCLH).

“Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with an estimated 1.8 million deaths in 2020,” said Siow Ming Lee, professor of medical oncology at University Hospital London and leader of the UK arm of the study. “We are now entering this very exciting era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer … We hope this will provide an opportunity to further improve outcomes for our NSCLC [non-small cell lung cancer] patients, whether in the early or advanced stages.”

Non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, is one of two primary kinds of lung cancer and is the most common kind. The other kind is small cell lung cancer (SCLC). In NSCLC, cancer cells originate in the lung tissue, and although it grows slower than the small cell variant, NSCLC has often spread to other body parts by the time it’s diagnosed.

The novel vaccine, BNT116, made by the German biotech company BioNTech, uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to present markers from the tumor to the patient’s immune system so it can recognize and fight the cancer cells carrying the tumor markers. The vaccine works selectively on cancer cells via the patient’s immune system, rather than, say, chemotherapy, which can be toxic to both cancerous and healthy cells.

Image source: Epizentrum, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.