New Personalized mRNA Vaccine Keeps Pancreatic Cancer At Bay 6 Years After Treatment

The findings, announced at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, are a long-term follow-up to a clinical trial of autogene cevumeran, a therapeutic mRNA cancer “vaccine” that is being developed and researched by biotechnology companies BioNTech and Genentech.

In 2023, it was reported that – when combined with chemotherapy and a kind of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) – the personalized vaccine triggered a substantial immune response in half of the 16 patients it was tested in; 18 months later, none of these individuals showed signs of cancer recurrence after having their tumors surgically removed.

This was an impressive result because pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which accounts for most cases of pancreatic cancer and all cases in the study, is highly intractable to most forms of treatment. Even those who have their tumors surgically removed have up to an 80 percent chance of their cancer returning.

The follow-up reports that seven of the eight people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive between four and six years after receiving the last treatment. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is usually around 13 percent.

“As we continue to learn more about how these vaccines work, there is a real belief and determination in the pancreatic cancer community that we can effectively treat this disease by training the patient’s own immune system,” said the trial's principal investigator Vinod Balachandran, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in a statement. “But continued progress requires continued research and testing.”

Pancreatic cancer was once thought to be a poor target for immune-system-based treatments because it showed little susceptibility to ICI, a kind of treatment that has been effective at tackling other types of cancer. Essentially, ICI works by blocking protein “checkpoints” that otherwise stop the immune system from attacking cancer cells.

The problem is that, even when the immune system is let off the leash like this, it still needs some way of targeting cancer cells, and pancreatic cancer has relatively few of the distinguishing “neoantigens” that allow the immune system to spot it. “In most people with pancreatic cancer, these neoantigens are not detected by immune cells, so the immune system does not perceive the tumor cells as threats,” Balachandran explained.

To get around this problem, his team turned to mRNA vaccine technology, the same kind used to produce vaccines against viruses like COVID-19. It works by introducing a small piece of genetic code – mRNA – that instructs a person's cells to make a protein that could trigger an immune response.

Researchers at BioNTech sequenced the genome of the patients' tumors and used this to design individualized vaccines against neoantigens present in that person's cancer. Unlike a traditional vaccine, which you would take as a preventative measure before contracting an infection, this cancer vaccine works as a therapy you take after developing cancer in order to prevent it from recurring.

Pancreatic cancer has more than doubled in incidence over the past three decades – from around 196,000 new cases worldwide in 1990 to over 510,000 in 2022 – and it now ranks as the sixth leading cause of cancer death globally. There has also been a rise in cancer cases among people under 50 that has yet to be fully explained.

While the trial has been successful, and it is encouraging to see that success continuing in the long-term follow-up, 16 people is still a very small number on which to test a drug and more work needs to be done. The people in the trial also had their cancer detected at a relatively early stage, which is unusual for pancreatic cancer. A phase II trial involving some 260 people began in 2023 and is estimated to complete by 2031.