Doctors have begun trialing the world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine in patients, as experts hailed its “groundbreaking” potential to save thousands of lives, The Guardian reports.
Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumors have spread, are particularly poor.
Now experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
The phase 1 clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the UK, US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Turkey.
The jab uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumor markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.
The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.
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