Expert Discusses Ongoing Research in Treatment With Cancer Vaccines

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mRNA may be a potential modality for developing cancer-based vaccines, according to Catherine J. Wu, MD.

It will be important to ensure that cancer vaccines can be manufactured and administered more quickly as research expands how patients can have the best possible immune response to this modality, said Catherine J. Wu, MD.

In a conversation with CancerNetwork®, Wu, chief of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies and a Lavine Family Chair for Preventative Cancer Therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, spoke about how current research aims to meet various time and cost considerations related to vaccine-based therapy, thereby improving the way vaccines are delivered to patients with cancer. According to Wu, researchers have made progress in advancing mRNA-based vaccines in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she suggested that this modality could hold promise in the management of cancer.

Transcript:

One of the aspects of cancer vaccines is that it is a multicomponent type of therapy. In fact, there is a need for study in all those different areas. There is always interest in thinking about better adjuvant [treatments]. There is a strong interest in thinking about better delivery approaches. There has been so much progress, thanks to the [COVID-19] pandemic, in terms of mRNA research, and this is a whole new modality that we had very little experience with before. Now we have a lot of experience, and so I think it’s a great time to pay it forward and see how far we can go with the vaccines using that modality.

There’s a lot of work that’s ongoing in terms of engineering with better biomaterials that we can use to either stimulate antigen-specific T cells or use approaches so that we can improve the priming and get the best possible immune response out of our vaccines. That’s a lot. Finally, in terms of trying to make this more mainstream, we will always have to consider the time and cost considerations. How do we make vaccines rapidly? In doing so, especially for patients with cancer, we have to consider that we need to deploy the vaccines quickly. Having a way to manufacture them in a more rapid [way] that scales is important.

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