A new study suggests mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could do more than prevent severe infection: They may also make some cancer immunotherapies work better.
According to Science News, researchers reporting Oct. 22 in Nature found that people with non-small cell lung cancer who received an mRNA COVID vaccine within about 100 days of checkpoint-inhibitor treatment lived substantially longer than patients in the same records who were not vaccinated.
The reported dataset included roughly 1,000 people with non-small cell lung cancer. All had received checkpoint-inhibitor immunotherapy, and nearly 200 had also received an mRNA COVID shot within 100 days of treatment, Science News reported.
At three years after diagnosis, 56 percent of vaccinated patients were still alive, compared with 31 percent of unvaccinated patients, according to the study results as described by Science News. The outlet also reported that researchers saw a similar pattern in patients with advanced melanoma.
Why researchers think this could be happening
The idea did not come out of nowhere. Science News says the team had already reported mouse experiments in Nature Biomedical Engineering suggesting mRNA vaccines can amplify the effects of immunotherapy.
In tumor-bearing mice receiving immunotherapy, the mRNA vaccine switched on what researcher Elias Sayour described, via Science News, as a strong molecular alarm signal from the immune system. The article says the effect appeared with another kind of mRNA vaccine as well, but not with non-mRNA vaccines.
Science News reported that the correlation in patients suggests mRNA vaccines, including ones not designed for cancer, could make tumors more sensitive to current therapies.
Promising result, not a proven treatment change
The biggest caveat is also the most important one: this was not a randomized clinical trial.
The findings come from patient records, which can reveal striking patterns without proving that one thing caused the other. Science News quoted University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cancer vaccine researcher Hua Wang, who was not involved in the work, saying it is still too early to say whether combining immunotherapy with nonspecific mRNA vaccines truly benefits cancer patients. Study author Elias Sayour agreed, adding that "it's important for people to understand that this isn't proven yet," according to the report.
That means no one should read this as evidence that an off-the-shelf COVID shot has already become an established cancer therapy. What the study offers for now, as reported by Science News, is a promising signal that needs to be tested in a clinical trial.
What happens next
To find out whether the link holds up under more controlled conditions, the researchers are working on a clinical trial and, according to Science News, hoped to begin enrolling patients by the end of the year.
Science News reported that Sayour said confirmation in a clinical trial could amount to a "paradigm shift in the cancer field" by giving doctors a widely available option to help treat patients with aggressive cancers.
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