Perlmutter Cancer Center Clinical Trial Tests Personalized mRNA Vaccine for Treating Metastatic Melanoma
Source: NYU Langone Health NewsHub, March 2024
Vaccines developed using mRNA technology helped turn the tide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, researchers at NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center and other cancer centers around the world are looking at using mRNA vaccines to personalize cancer treatment.
A large-scale international phase 3 clinical trial is evaluating the effectiveness of combining the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab with V940, a personalized, experimental mRNA vaccine, to treat people with metastatic melanoma. The trial is led at NYU Langone by Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD, deputy director of Perlmutter Cancer Center.
V940 trains the immune system to attack proteins called neoantigens that are specific to a patient’s tumor and not found in normal tissue. Researchers sequence the patient’s tumor to create a vaccine customized for their cancer that targets up to 34 of the neoantigens. An earlier phase 2b trial tested the combination of V940 and pembrolizumab in 107 patients who had had surgery to remove melanoma from lymph nodes or other organs and were at high risk of the disease returning in sites distant from the original cancer. In 24 subjects of 107 (22.4 percent), melanoma returned within three years of follow-up, compared with 20 out of 50 (40 percent) of those who received only pembrolizumab.