World’s First Lung Cancer Vaccine Is Ready for Humans!

The world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine is ready for its first clinical trial with human patients, and experts are optimistic the groundbreaking treatment has the potential to save thousands of lives.

“We are now entering this very exciting new era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer,” says Professor Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, leading the trial in the UK. “It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them.”

The BNT116 vaccine by BioNTech uses mRNA – messenger RNA – like in COVID-19 vaccines, presenting the immune system with tumor markers from non-small cell lung cancer to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers. Unlike chemotherapy, the goal is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched. The phase 1 clinical trial of BNT116 will be launched in 34 research sites in seven countries – the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain, and Turkey – with 130 patients from early-stage before surgery or radiotherapy to late-stage disease or recurrent cancer taking the vaccine along with immunotherapy. Each of the six consecutive injections – five minutes apart over 30 minutes – contains different RNA strands. First, the patients will get the vaccine every week for six weeks, then every three weeks for 54 weeks. “We hope to go on to phase 2, phase 3, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves many lung cancer patients.”