Could mRNA Give Us a Cancer Vaccine?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It's Thursday, August 20th. There's no custom shot you can take to stop cancer. Yet, you start here. Drug makers say they've taken a giant leap in the form of mRNA vaccines.
So this could be used and is being tested in clinical trials for patients with all different kinds of cancers.
The study is about skin cancer, but they're hoping the findings go much, much further. All politics are local, especially if you've got data centers in your back.
yard, there's been a lot of backlash in uh particularly rural parts of different states, including places like Florida. What we've learned
from a busy primary week, and Vlodymyr Zelensky confronts the possibility of a new
threat, an election. Saying actually we need to reform and we need to get rid of corruption at all costs. Could a challenge from inside Ukraine's
government grow too loud to ignore? From ABC News, this is Start Here. I'm Brad Milkey.
The last few years have been a roller coaster for anyone working on mRNA vaccines. You remember these COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were really the first time many Americans had heard of this technology. And just to step back and remind ourselves what these are the job of any vaccine is to teach your body to fight off foreign invaders, right? Like a virus. But many vaccines do that by injecting you with a harmless bit of the virus itself, triggering an immune response in your cells. What these vaccines do is instead of delivering a piece of dead or weekend virus, they use messenger RNA, mRNA, to give our cells a kind of blueprint to creating the proteins that can help keep us safe. Like I said, been a roller coaster ride.
These things have been criticized by healthcare skeptics. HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk and benefits for these respiratory viruses. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said the process wasn't tested enough, despite the largest successful vaccine rollout in human history taking place, by the way, under his boss President Trump.
How does the new mRNA melanoma vaccine work and why is it considered a breakthrough?
Well, now mRNA vaccines are getting some exciting press once again. Earlier this month, the FDA approved an mRNA flu vaccine, and yesterday, the drug makers Merck and Moderna announced a successful trial. Of a new vaccine that helped guard cancer survivors against repeat cases. So the question now is: not just are we on the verge of new mRNA vaccines, but could they be giving us vaccines for cancer? Let's go to Dr. Michael Posto. He's the chief of the melanoma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He's one of the doctors that was part of this clinical trial. Dr. Posto, first up, this was for melanoma, right? Very deadly skin cancer. What is this drug and how does it work?
Thank you for your interest in this story. We're thrilled with the results of this phase three study that have been reported on top-line information so far. This drug is something called entismeran, and it's a personalized cancer therapeutic vaccination strategy where a patient's tumor is used as a blueprint to make their own individual vaccine. And the idea is that if we can just steer the immune response directly to the tumor cells that are abnormal. then in theory that would be the exact type of response we want to eliminate the residual tumors that might be within a patient that we can't see. And what that actually means for patients in this trial, these patients had high-risk melanoma, it was surgically removed, and the vaccine in combination with another drug called quetruda was shown to reduce the risk of these patients having recurrent melanoma in the future compared to ketruda alone.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:34
2
How does the new mRNA melanoma vaccine work and why is it considered a breakthrough?
2:34–6:36
3
What were the key results of the Merck‑Moderna melanoma vaccine trial?
6:36–11:50
4
Why is mRNA technology crucial for personalized cancer vaccines?
11:50–20:48
5
How might the melanoma vaccine platform be applied to other cancers?
20:48–28:20
6
What did the recent Florida primary results reveal about progressive Democrats?
28:20–30:08