Biology Digest

  There’s hope for treating one of the   deadliest forms of cancer.  A pancreatic cancer vaccine has proven to be effective in half of patients treated in a small trial, according to a study published in the  journal Nature  on Wednesday. Pancreatic cancer — often  called the “silent killer,”  since symptoms don’t show up in most patients until it has spread to other organs — occurs when cells in the pancreas mutate and form a tumor. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York sent tumor samples from 16 patients to scientists at  BioNTech in Germany,  the same company Pfizer teamed up with to produce COVID-19 vaccines.  After scientists analyzed proteins in patient’s cancer cells, they used messenger RNA — a molecule that contains instructions to direct cells to make a protein — in a vaccine for each patient, attempting to tell the immune system to attack the cancer cells. Along with the vaccine, subjects were also given chemotherapy and a drug meant to keep tumors from combatti

  Researchers say they have successfully completed a trial of a personalised cancer vaccine that uses the same messenger-RNA technology as Covid jabs. The experimental vaccine, made by Moderna and MSD, is designed to prime the immune system to seek and destroy cancerous cells. Doctors hope work such as this could lead to revolutionary new ways to fight skin, bowel and other types of cancer. Moderna and MSD called it "a new paradigm" moment. Other pharmaceutical companies are looking to run similar studies. But this is the first phase-IIb randomised clinical trial to test the investigational mRNA vaccine in patients. Could Covid vaccine technology crack cancer? Patients taking Keytruda for advanced melanoma were less likely to die, or have the skin cancer reoccur, if they also had the jab, mRNA-4157/V940, Moderna and MSD said. The findings, in 157 patients, have not yet been scrutinised by independent experts or regulators. More trials will be needed to check how effective the