A new vaccine that fights lung cancer is being tested for the first time on patients in the UK, with researchers saying it could improve survival rates and eventually become the standard of care worldwide.
The first British patient received the jab at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility (CRF), reports The Independent.
Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, it is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
It utilises messenger RNA (mRNA) and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.
It is hoped the jab will bolster a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.
Professor Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH), which is leading the trial in the UK, said the technology has moved incredibly fast.
“It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them.”
The phase one clinical trial is the first in human study of BNT116, which will be given to lung cancer patients alongside standard immunotherapy.
“Immunotherapy has made huge progress, especially in lung cancer,” Lee added. “But it still doesn’t treat all lung cancer patients successfully. We know it’s well tolerated for our Covid vaccine patients, so we hope it will be well tolerated for cancer patients.
“This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment. We’ve been through chemotherapy. We’ve been through the standard immunotherapy treatment for some lung cancer patients.
“We’ve got personalised treatments using EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor). But now we just want to add on another additional immune approach attack, and we hope it’s a success.”
The trial will take place across 34 research sites in seven countries, with six of them in England and Wales.
Overall, it is hoped about 130 lung cancer patients will be enrolled, 20 of whom will be based in the UK.
Lung cancer is one of the most common types of cancer, with more than 43 000 new diagnoses in the UK every year.
“I’ve been in lung cancer research for 40 years now,” Lee added. “When I started in the 1990s, nobody believed chemotherapy worked.
“We now know about 20%-30% of patients stay alive with stage four with immunotherapy and now we want to improve survival rates.
“So hopefully this mRNA vaccine, on top of immunotherapy, might provide the extra boost. We hope to go on to phase two, phase three, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves lots of lung cancer patients.”
In July 2023, the UK Government signed an agreement with BioNTech to provide up to 10 000 patients with precision cancer immunotherapies by 2030.
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