“From a therapeutic standpoint for cancer in general, this is a potentially important advance,” Dr. Ryan Sullivan, a melanoma expert at Mass General Cancer who worked on the study involving men and women, said in a statement. at high risk of melanoma recurrence.
The results, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Orlando, Florida, add detailed data to partial findings released by the companies in December.
The Merck and Moderna collaboration combines powerful immune-boosting drugs with vaccine technology. BioNTech SE 22UAy.DE and Gritstone Bio Inc GRTS.O are working on cancer vaccines based on mRNA technology.
Moderna’s vaccine is custom-made from analysis of the patient’s tumors after surgical removal. Vaccines are designed to train the immune system to recognize and attack specific mutations in cancer cells.
Merck’s Keytruda, approved to treat melanoma and many other types of cancer, belongs to a class of widely used immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors, designed to turn off the protein PD-1, or programmed death 1, which helps the cancer to evade the immune system.
Merck noted that the companies are in discussions with US regulators about the design of a late-stage trial, likely necessary for approval of the combination regimen.
Eliav Barr, head of global clinical development and chief medical officer at Merck, said in an interview that it could be three to four years before the results of the larger trials are known.
Barr noted that it took Moderna about eight weeks to design a personalized mRNA vaccine for each patient.
With information from Reuters.