The American pharmaceutical Moderna announced this Tuesday promising results in preliminary tests of its vaccine against cancer, which when combined with a treatment from the company MSD helped patients to avoid the reappearance of melanomas (skin cancer) after being operated.
In a statement, the two companies explained that the use of the vaccine together with the drug Keytruda reduced the risk of patients to relapse or die by 44% compared to when that cancer treatment was used alone.
“Today’s results are very encouraging for the field of cancer treatment,” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, in the note, who announced that the company is going to proceed with a larger study to confirm these data and with other trials on melanomas and different types of cancer.
The vaccine uses messenger RNA technology, the same technology that Moderna used to develop its covid-19 vaccine, and the company believes it can harness it to personalize cancer treatments.
In this case, the vaccine has been combined with Keytruda, a successful drug developed by MSD (known as Merk in the US and Canada) to treat cancer.
According to the companies, in the trials -in which 157 patients participated- 14.4% suffered serious adverse effects related to treatment with the two combined treatments, compared to 10% in the case of those who only received Keytruda.
Moderna and MSD announced that they will discuss the results with regulatory authorities and that they plan to initiate a phase 3 study in patients with melanoma in 2023.