A universal cancer vaccine may be inching closer to becoming reality, after University of Florida researchers suggested last week that findings from their recent study could lead to the development of a universal shot that can jumpstart the immune system to fight cancer.
Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, it showed that an experimental mRNA vaccine boosted the tumour-fighting effects of a common cancer drug called immune checkpoint inhibitors, reports CNBC News.
The vaccine is not designed for a specific virus or cancer cells, but engineered to “wake up” the immune system against the disease, “spurring it to respond as if fighting a virus”, they said of their mouse 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 anti-cancer reaction,” said Dr Duane Mitchell, a co-author of the study and professor of neurosurgery at the university’s College of Medicine.
That’s unlike current approaches to cancer vaccines, which involve finding a target expressed by many cancer patients or, in the case of Moderna and Merck, developing personalised vaccines tailored to each patient’s specific tumour.
The universal vaccine has the potential to be used broadly across cancer patients, “even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine”, Mitchell said.
The team is still working to replicate the findings in humans, and if they do, a one-size-fits-all vaccine could provide an alternative to surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, they believe.
How it works
The mRNA shot essentially tells the body to produce certain proteins that stimulate the immune system, including one called PD-L1, which is often found on the surface or inside of cancer cells. Those cells often use PD-L1 to hide from immune attacks.
But by boosting PD-L1, the vaccine can actually make tumours more vulnerable to immune checkpoint inhibitors that block that protein, helping the immune system recognise and destroy the cancer.
The study showed promising results on treatment-resistant tumours in skin cancers by combining the mRNA vaccine with a monoclonal antibody, a common immunotherapy drug that attempts to alert the immune system that a tumour is foreign and should be attacked.
It also showed positive results when tested on mouse skin, bone and brain cancers as a solo treatment. In some cases, the tumours were eliminated entirely.
“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 senior author Dr Elias Sayour, a University of Florida Health paediatric oncologist.
The research team is working to improve current formulations and move to human clinical trials as rapidly as possible.
Vaccines for cancer
Cancer vaccines have been approved in the past, such as Provenge, the Seattle biotech company Dendreon’s shot used to treat certain forms of advanced prostate cancer.
There are also others currently undergoing the clinical trial process, like Moderna’s experimental mRNA-4157 cancer vaccine, which aims to prevent the recurrence of melanoma and lung cancer and has progressed to phase 3 in its clinical trials.
However, what makes this new study notable is the fact that it is one step closer to researchers finding a vaccine to treat all types of cancer, rather than a specific type, said experts.
“This strategy could be a promising neoadjuvant therapy prior to checkpoint blockades or other cancer therapies,” Hua Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Newsweek.
“With more success of personalised cancer vaccines, the researchers, clinicians, and the patient community will hopefully gain more confidence in cancer vaccines,” said Wang, who is not associated with the study. “At that stage, the goal of developing a universal cancer vaccine will be more reachable.”
While the findings are a “promising” breakthrough in cancer research, Wang said that “rigorous safety evaluations and the optimisation for therapeutic benefits are needed before this strategy can move forward”.
He added that practically, “personalised” cancer vaccines are “more likely to cross the finish line because of the higher specificity and thus less off-target effects”.
While many types of cancer vaccines are currently being tested in clinical trials, Wang said that the challenge largely lies in “the balance of therapeutic benefits and safety”.
David Braun, Professor of Medicine and member of the Centre of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at Yale Cancer Centre, who was not involved with the research, deemed the study “exciting early data”, but said it still has “a long path to having a major impact on the treatment of cancers in individuals”.
"Most cancer vaccines try to steer the immune system to attack a patient's cancer, which makes it very difficult to create a universal vaccine.
“Here, the research team is proposing the idea that the vaccination itself, somewhat irrespective of what it is targeting, might stimulate the immune system enough to attack cancer.
"It is a very intriguing idea, but would need to be tested very carefully in clinical studies.”
He said the study had two important goals.
“One is to understand why current immune-based treatments work so well in some patients, and the second is to try to use that knowledge to design new immune treatments. In animal models, the research team is able to make tumours more sensitive to immune therapy using this new approach. While these are exciting early data, we do have to remember that this is early work in animal studies, and so there is still a long path to having a major impact on the treatment of cancers in individuals.”
Study details
Sensitisation of tumours to immunotherapy by boosting early type-I interferon responses enables epitope spreading
Sadeem Qdaisat, Brandon Wummer, Brian D. Stover et al.
Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering on 19 July 2025
Abstract
The success of cancer immunotherapies is predicated on the targeting of highly expressed neoepitopes, which preferentially favours malignancies with high mutational burden. Here we show that early responses by type-I interferons mediate the success of immune checkpoint inhibitors as well as epitope spreading in poorly immunogenic tumours and that these interferon responses can be enhanced via systemic administration of lipid particles loaded with RNA coding for tumour-unspecific antigens. In mice, the immune responses of tumours sensitive to checkpoint inhibitors were transferable to resistant tumours and resulted in heightened immunity with antigenic spreading that protected the animals from tumour rechallenge. Our findings show that the resistance of tumours to immunotherapy is dictated by the absence of a damage response, which can be restored by boosting early type-I interferon responses to enable epitope spreading and self-amplifying responses in treatment-refractory tumours.
CNBC article – Healthy Returns: Researchers move closer to a universal cancer vaccine (Open access)
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