The diagnosis is still often a death sentence: pancreatic cancer. About 90 percent of all patients die within two years after the tumor is diagnosed. Even after an operation followed by chemotherapy, the recurrence rate is high; statistically, only every fifth patient treated in this way lives longer than five years. In the search for new treatment options, the Mainz-based company Biontech is now reporting initial success.
It’s the first human study, and only 16 people took part, but the results are promising. The subjects are patients with pancreatic cancer whose tumors have already been surgically removed and who also underwent chemotherapy. Two and a half months after their interventions, the subjects were also given an mRNA drug that was specially adapted to the genetic characteristics of their tumor.
How mRNA technology works
Eight of the 16 subjects subsequently developed antibodies against their tumor cells and had a “significantly longer time” without a relapse than those patients who did not develop antibodies, Biontech said in a statement. “Our research so far and the study now shows that the immune system can recognize antigens from cancer cells and that we can use mRNA to train T cells to recognize these antigens,” says study leader Vinod Balachandran. “Now we want to further investigate these results in a large double-blind study.”
Biontech is already using mRNA technology with great success as a vaccine against the coronavirus. mRNA stands for messenger ribonucleic acid, also known as messenger RNA. The body itself uses RNA to translate the information stored in the genes into chemical processes. mRNA vaccines use the same principle: no pathogens or their components are required as with conventional vaccines. Instead, parts of the genetic information of the virus are transported into the human cell as RNA, where they stimulate the production of part of the pathogen. The immune system can then train on these parts of the virus.
That’s why pancreatic cancer is so dangerous
The training of the immune system against cancer cells works in a very similar way. These differ from healthy cells by mutations on their surface. Biontech’s goal is to use mRNA to “train” the immune system to recognize and destroy these mutated cancer cells: “Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest types of tumor because hardly any therapy works, not even immunotherapy,” explains Vinod Balachandran. “Research assumes that pancreatic cancer mutates only slightly, making it difficult for the immune system to recognize these cancer cells.”
Biontech founders Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin have been researching mRNA technology, which was originally developed for cancer therapy, for decades. When the pandemic broke out in early 2020, the company used its knowledge to quickly produce a vaccine against the coronavirus. mRNA is now being tested as a possible therapy in various areas of medicine. There are first successful studies, for example, in the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS).
