From April 17-22, 2026, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) held their annual meeting in San Diego, CA. The AACR Annual Meeting brings together clinicians, researchers, and health-care professionals to discuss the latest advancements in cancer treatment and research. Dr. Vinod Balachandran MD, the Director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center provided exciting, updated results for a Phase 1 clinical evaluating a therapeutic messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common form of pancreatic cancer and has only a 13 percent 5-year survival rate. While surgery can potentially cure early-stage disease, many patients see recurrence of their tumors even after surgery and chemotherapy. This highlights the urgency for new treatment strategies to enhance the response of patients diagnosed with resectable PDAC.
One treatment that has been transformative lung cancer and melanoma is immunotherapy. Immunotherapy uses the patient’s own immune system to fight tumor cells; the most widely effective approach has been checkpoint inhibition (anti-PD1/anti-PDL1/anti-CTLA4 therapies). Checkpoint inhibition has so-far been ineffective for pancreatic cancer, but promising early results are being reported for a different immunotherapy approach called a “cancer vaccine.”
Dr. Balanchadran is the principal investigator for a phase 1 clinical trial evaluating a messenger RNA (mRNA) cancer vaccine called autogene cevumeran in patients diagnosed with resectable PDAC. Started in December 2019, 16 patients were treated with the mRNA vaccine in combination with atezolizumab, a checkpoint inhibitor, and the chemotherapy FOLFIRINOX after surgery to remove their tumor. Dr. Balanchardran’s presentation provided an update on these 16 patients up to 6 years after their treatment. In 50% of patients (8 out of the 16) treatment activated tumor-specific T cells and of those 8 patients, 7 patients (87%) are still alive 4-6 years after treatment.
While these results are encouraging, the size of this trial was small and needs to be expanded. Based on the strength of these results, a phase 2 clinical trial has been initiated by Genentech in collaboration with BioNTech, to continue to evaluate the potential of autogene cevumeran for PDAC patients.
What is a cancer vaccine?
A vaccine is a substance used to train or teach a person’s immune system to respond to a specific disease or pathogen. The immune system consists of red and white blood cells. There are multiple types of white blood cells, and each has a specific role to play in an immune response. The role of one type of these white blood cells, the T cells, is to recognize foreign signals (antigens) and trigger an immune response.
Tumor cells accumulate genetic mutations as they replicate and these mutated genes produce proteins that can be recognized as foreign signals (called neoantigens) by T cells. In many patients with cancer, T cells cannot detect the neoantigens produced by tumor cells and this is commonly seen in pancreatic cancer. A cancer vaccine can introduce neoantigens to a patient’s T cells in a way that can train them to detect and then destroy tumor cells.
What is autogene cevumeran?
Autogene cevumeran is the name of the personalized cancer vaccine now being developed by BioNTech and Genentech/Roche, also called BNT122 and RO7198457. It is generated from the mutations found in a patient’s own tumor. Patients’ tumors were removed and the DNA from the tumor was sequenced. An algorithm predicted and selected neoantigens specific to each patient to be used as a vaccine. Up to 20 peptides were chosen based on their predicted ability to train T cells, a type of white blood cell, to recognize and destroy tumor cells.
