mRNA Vaccine Therapy

Why in News?

• The results of a trial of messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA-4157/V940) vaccine made by Moderna and MSD (Merck & Co.) when taken along with an immunotherapy drug Keytruda has  recently shown promising results against advanced melanoma, a kind of skin cancer.

Highlights

• It is a personalised cancer vaccine i.e., tailor-made for every patient.
• To build the vaccine, researchers took samples of patients’ tumors and healthy tissue.
• After analysing the samples to decode their genetic sequence and isolate mutant proteins associated only with the cancer, that information was used to design the vaccine.
• The personalised cancer vaccine uses the same m-RNA technology that was used to produce the Covid-19 vaccine.
• mRNA vaccines use mRNA to teach our cells how to make a protein that triggers an immune response inside our bodies.
• It allows the body’s immune system to seek and destroy cancerous cells.
• The personalised cancer vaccine works in concert with Keytruda, to disable a protein called Programmed Death 1 (PD-1), that helps tumors to evade the immune system.
• When injected into a patient, the patient’s cells act as a manufacturing plant, producing perfect copies of the mutations for the immune system to recognise and destroy.
• Having been exposed to the mutations without the virus, the body learns to fight off the infection.
• The vaccine showed a 44% reduction in the risk of dying of cancer or having the cancer progress.
• The combination of mRNA-4157/V940 and Keytruda was generally safe and demonstrated the benefit compared with Keytruda alone after a year of treatment