Nature just released a “huh, go figure!” bit of preliminary research showing better outcomes for patients with melanoma or lung cancer who had a COVID-19 vaccination within 100 days of starting cancer immunotherapy. It’s an unexpected boon from the way mRNA shots boost the immune system overall:
“The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine acts like a siren and activates the immune system throughout the entire body”, including inside the tumour, where it “starts programming a response to kill the cancer”, says Adam Grippin, a radiation oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, an co-author of the report published today in Nature. “We were amazed at the results in our patients.”
The findings, which Grippin and his colleagues hope to validate in a clinical trial, suggest further hidden capabilities of mRNA vaccines, even as the administration of US President Donald Trump has slashed about US$500 million in funding for research investigating the technology.
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Checkpoint inhibitors unleash the immune system to attack cancer cells. They have transformed the treatment of many cancers, but they fail in more than half of the people who receive them: some recipients’ immune systems remain too sluggish to attack cancer cells.
To address this gap, researchers have been developing personalized ‘cancer vaccines’. These would be used in tandem with checkpoint inhibitors to help an individual’s immune system to target the unique mutations found in their cancer cells. Although early results are promising, these treatments are still experimental and, once available, will probably be very expensive and difficult to access.
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The researchers analysed the medical records of more than 1,000 people with lung cancer or melanoma. They found that, in people with a certain type of lung cancer, receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was linked to a near doubling in survival time, from 21 months to 37 months. Unvaccinated people with metastatic melanoma survived an average of 27 months; by the time data collection ended, vaccinated people had survived so long that the researchers couldn’t calculate an average survival time. People whose tumours had traits hinting that they were unlikely to respond to checkpoint inhibitors saw the biggest survival boost after vaccination.
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You can read more of Grippin’s research here, also in Nature.