Could This Be The End Of Cancer? Scientists Develop Revolutionary mRNA Vaccine

In a significant advancement in cancer research, scientists at the University of Florida have developed an experimental mRNA vaccine that enhances the body's immune response against tumours. The study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, shows that this vaccine, when combined with standard immunotherapy drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors, produced a strong antitumor effect in mice.

What makes the finding especially promising is that the vaccine doesn't target specific tumour proteins. Instead, it activates the immune system as if it were fighting a virus. This effect was achieved by boosting the expression of a protein called PD-L1 within tumours, which made them more responsive to treatment.

Lead researcher Dr. Elias Sayour, a paediatric oncologist at UF Health, said in a news release this discovery could lead to a new way of treating cancer without relying solely on surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and other major institutions.

If future studies in humans show similar results, the research could pave the way for a universal cancer vaccine that helps treat many types of difficult, treatment-resistant cancers.

"This paper describes a very unexpected and exciting observation: that even a vaccine not specific to any particular tumor or virus - so long as it is an mRNA vaccine - could lead to tumor-specific effects," said Sayour, principal investigator at the RNA Engineering Laboratory within UF's Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy.

"This finding is a proof of concept that these vaccines potentially could be commercialized as universal cancer vaccines to sensitize the immune system against a patient's individual tumor," said Sayour, a McKnight Brain Institute investigator and co-leader of a program in immuno-oncology and microbiome research.

Until now, there have been two main ideas in cancer-vaccine development: to find a specific target expressed in many people with cancer or to tailor a vaccine that is specific to targets expressed within a patient's own cancer.

"This study suggests a third emerging paradigm," said Duane Mitchell, MD, PhD, a co-author of the paper. "What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction. And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients, even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine."

For more than eight years, Sayour has pioneered high-tech anticancer vaccines by combining lipid nanoparticles and mRNA. Short for messenger RNA, mRNA is found inside every cell, including tumour cells, and serves as a blueprint for protein production.

This new study builds upon a breakthrough last year by Sayour's lab: In a first-ever human clinical trial, an mRNA vaccine quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumour with a dismal prognosis. Among the most impressive findings in the four-patient trial was how quickly the new method, which used a "specific" or personalised vaccine made using a patient's own tumour cells, spurred a vigorous immune system response to reject the tumour.

In the latest study, Sayour's research team adapted their technology to test a "generalised" mRNA vaccine, meaning it was not aimed at a specific virus or mutated cells of cancer but engineered simply to prompt a strong immune system response. The mRNA formulation was made similarly to the COVID-19 vaccines, rooted in similar technology, but wasn't aimed directly at the well-known spike protein of COVID.