Scientists at the University of Florida have made a new experimental mRNA vaccine that helps the body’s immune system fight tumours. This vaccine, tested in mice, works even better when used with immunotherapy drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors. The study was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

The most exciting part is that this new vaccine does not need to target any specific cancer cells. Instead, it makes the immune system act like it’s fighting a virus, which helps it attack the cancer more strongly.

This effect was made possible by increasing a protein called PD-L1 in tumours. This protein helps make the tumours more open to being attacked by the immune system.

Dr. Elias Sayour, a paediatric cancer doctor and lead researcher at UF Health, said in a news release that this new method might help treat cancer without always needing surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and other major organisations.

Could this lead to a universal cancer vaccine?

The big dream of scientists is to create a universal cancer vaccine—a vaccine that can help treat many types of cancer, not just one. This study shows strong proof of concept, which means it gives early signs that the idea can work.

"This paper describes a very unexpected and exciting observation: that even a vaccine not specific to any particular tumour or virus—so long as it is an mRNA vaccine—could lead to tumour-specific effects," said Dr. Sayour, who works at the RNA Engineering Laboratory in UF’s Preston A. Wells Jr. Centre for Brain Tumour Therapy.

"This finding is a proof of concept that these vaccines potentially could be commercialised as universal cancer vaccines to sensitise the immune system against a patient's individual tumour," added Sayour, who is also a researcher at the McKnight Brain Institute.

Until now, scientists followed two main ideas for cancer vaccines:

  1. Find a common target that appears in many cancer patients
  2. Create a personalised vaccine from each patient’s own cancer cells

But this new research shows a third new idea. "This study suggests a third emerging paradigm," said Dr. Duane Mitchell, co-author of the study.
"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."

Built on years of research

Dr. Sayour has spent over eight years working on cancer vaccines using mRNA and lipid nanoparticles. mRNA (short for messenger RNA) gives instructions to cells, and this vaccine uses it to train the immune system to attack tumours.

This study builds on a 2023 breakthrough from the same lab. Back then, they ran a small human trial with personalised mRNA vaccines made from each patient’s own tumour cells. One of the cancers tested was glioblastoma, a deadly brain tumour. The trial showed that the vaccine quickly made the immune system fight back.

In this latest research, they tried a general mRNA vaccine, similar to the COVID-19 vaccine but not targeted at COVID. Instead, it was made to boost the immune response in general.

While it has only been tested in mice so far, if future studies in humans show the same result, this vaccine could become a universal cancer treatment in the future.

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