A cancer vaccine made from your own tumour cut melanoma's return by 42% in a landmark trial

Every patient's melanoma carries a unique set of mutations — so Merck and Moderna built a vaccine from each patient's own tumour. The treatment, intismeran, encodes up to 34 of those personal mutations and teaches the immune system to hunt them. In the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial of 1,137 people whose high-risk melanoma had been surgically removed, adding the personalised vaccine to the standard drug Keytruda cut the risk of the cancer returning or of death by 42% over about two years, and cut the risk of distant spread or death by 38%. Two years on, 82.2% of vaccine patients remained recurrence-free, against 70% on Keytruda alone. The results, accepted by The New England Journal of Medicine, are the first positive Phase 3 readout for a personalised mRNA cancer therapy. 'For decades, cancer treatment has largely been defined by where a tumor originates,' said principal investigator Professor Georgina Long of Melanoma Institute Australia. 'These findings support a fundamentally new and individualized approach.'

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation