Pioneer in Cancer Vaccines Sees Promise In — and Beyond — Melanoma Trial
“This is not a time that we should be pulling back,” says Catherine Wu
In mid-August, the drugmakers Moderna and Merck announced that a cancer vaccine trial had successfully lowered risk of both death and metastases of melanoma, a deadly skin cancer.
The experimental cancer vaccine, designed to be given to melanoma patients after initial treatment, primes the immune system to recognize and attack tumor cells if they recur.
Moderna and Merck announced only that the phase 3 trial was successful. The companies plan to release full results at a European conference later this year.
The trial’s approach — which tunes immune cells to recognize tumor-specific proteins called neoantigens — was pioneered in part at Harvard Medical School-affiliated labs, including those of Catherine Wu, HMS professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Nir Hacohen, HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
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