First British patients to receive experimental cancer therapy with messenger RNA
A revolutionary new cancer treatment known as mRNA therapy has been administered to patients at Hammersmith Hospital in west London. The trial is designed to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the therapy in treating melanoma, lung cancer and other solid tumors.
The new treatment uses genetic material known as messenger RNA – or mRNA – and works by presenting common markers of tumors to the patient’s immune system.
The goal is to help recognize and fight cancer cells that express these markers.
“New mRNA-based cancer immunotherapies offer an opportunity to recruit patients’ own immune systems to fight their cancer,” said Dr. David Pinato of Imperial College London, a researcher on the UK arm of the study.
Pinato said this research is still in its early stages and could take years before it becomes available to patients. However, the new research laid a crucial foundation for the development of less toxic and more precise new anti-cancer therapies. “We urgently need these to turn the tide on cancer,” he added.
A number of cancer vaccines have recently entered clinical trials around the world. These fall into two categories: personalized cancer immunotherapies, which are based on extracting a patient’s own genetic material from their tumors; and therapeutic cancer immunotherapies, such as the mRNA therapy recently launched in London, which are ‘off-the-shelf’ and tailor-made for a particular type of cancer.
The primary goal of the new trial – known as Mobilize – is to discover whether this specific type of mRNA therapy is safe and tolerated by patients with lung or skin cancer and can shrink tumors. In some cases it will be administered alone and in other cases in combination with the existing cancer drug pembrolizumab.
Researchers say that while the experimental therapy is still in early stages of testing, they hope it could eventually lead to a new treatment option for hard-to-treat cancers if the approach is proven to be safe and effective.
Nearly one in two people in Britain will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. A range of therapies have been developed to treat patients, including chemotherapy and immunotherapies.
However, cancer cells can become resistant to drugs, making tumors more difficult to treat, and scientists are eager to find new approaches to tackling cancer.
Preclinical testing in both cell and animal models of cancer provided evidence that novel mRNA therapy had an effect on the immune system and could be offered to patients in early-phase clinical trials.