New Study Shows That Personalized mRNA Vaccines Have The Potential to Treat Pancreatic Cancer

A small but promising clinical study led by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center suggests that adding a personalized mRNA vaccine to standard treatment may bring new hope to pancreatic cancer patients. The study followed 16 pancreatic cancer patients. Specifically, in addition to standard treatments such as surgery and chemotherapy, these patients received a customized mRNA vaccine designed using their own tumors. Unlike vaccines that are originally designed to prevent disease, this vaccine is designed to help the patient's own immune system fight cancer.

mRNA cancer vaccines are a relatively new class of vaccines, which combine the potential of mRNA to encode for almost any protein with an excellent safety profile and a flexible production process.

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Teaching the human immune system to recognize cancer is often challenging, given that it is naturally unable to recognize its own body. This personalized mRNA vaccine works by targeting a genetic mutation found in pancreatic cancer, alerting the immune system to recognize and attack the tumor.

During surgery, doctors removed each patient's tumor and sent a sample of the removed tumor to German biotech company BioNTech. The patients then received their respective personalized mRNA vaccine along with immunotherapy and chemotherapy.

Of the 16 pancreatic cancer patients who participated in the study, eight had a strong immune response, and six of them remain cancer-free more than three years later. In contrast, seven of the eight patients who did not respond had their cancer recur. The difference seemed to depend on whether the patient's spleen was removed during surgery, as the spleen plays a critical role in immune function.

Given the small size of the study, senior author Dr. Vinod Balachandran said, "It's still difficult to attribute causality to this vaccine."

Dr. Suneel Kamath, a gastrointestinal oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic, reviewed the findings, noting that the survival rates of patients in the study were similar to those of early-stage pancreatic cancer patients who receive surgery and chemotherapy.

Figure 1. Vaccine immunity and neoantigen editing in patients with recurrent PDAC. (Sethna Z, et al., 2025)

"This is a great proof-of-concept study that shows we can make a vaccine for this disease. It does generate an immune response, and it persists. That's a really good pillar," Kamath said. A larger, randomized clinical trial focusing on early-stage pancreatic cancer patients with intact spleens is currently underway.

"The beauty of mRNA vaccines, as we've seen with COVID-19 vaccine development, is that they're very fast to make," Kamath said. "It's easy to make. Once you find a new target, you can make a vaccine for that specific target very quickly. That's really exciting because when we talk about curing cancer, it's not a single disease. There are probably hundreds of different targets for each cancer type. So the ability to quickly make vaccines against many different targets is very powerful."

The researchers are also exploring mRNA vaccines for melanoma, kidney cancer and lung cancer, which they believe may respond better because of their ability to pick up more mutations.