A new vaccine that primes the immune system to recognise and fight lung cancer is being tested for the first time on patients in the UK. Researchers leading the trial said the treatment could improve survival rates among people with the disease, with hopes that it could eventually become the standard of care worldwide.
Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease. It utilises messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.
It is hoped the jab will bolster a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy. Professor Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) which is leading the trial in the UK, told the PA news agency: “This technology has moved on incredibly fast.”
“It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them.” The phase one clinical trial is the first in human study of BNT116, which will be given to lung cancer patients alongside standard immunotherapy.
“Immunotherapy has made a big progress, especially in lung cancer,” Prof Lee added. “But it still doesn’t treat all lung cancer patients successfully. We know it’s well tolerated for our Covid vaccine patients, so we hope it will be well tolerated for cancer patients.”
“This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment. We’ve been through chemotherapy. We’ve been through the standard immunotherapy treatment for some lung cancer patients. We’ve got personalised treatments using EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor). But now we just want to add on another additional immune approach attack, and we hope it’s a success.”
The trial will take place across 34 research sites in seven countries, with six located in England and Wales. Overall, it is hoped about 130 lung cancer patients will be enrolled, 20 of whom will be based in the UK.
Janusz Racz, 67, who lives in London, is the first person to have the vaccine in the UK. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in May and soon after started chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which was given concurrently.
The scientist, who specialises in artificial intelligence (AI), told PA that the main reason he wanted to take part in the trial is his profession. “The main reason is that I am a scientist too, and I understand that the progress of science especially in medicine lies in people agreeing to be involved in such investigations,” Mr Racz said.
“It would be very beneficial for me, because it’s a new methodology not available for other patients that can help me to get rid of the cancer. And also, I can be a part of the team that can provide proof of concept for this new methodology, and the faster it would be implemented across the world, more people will be saved.”
Mr Racz received six consecutive injections given five minutes apart over a half-hour period at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility on Tuesday. Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for a total of 54 weeks.
Prof Lee added: “We hope adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back. We know the standard immunotherapy after concurrent chemo radiation can improve survival significantly.”
Lung cancer is one of the most common types of cancer, with more than 43,000 new diagnoses in the UK every year. “I’ve been in lung cancer research for 40 years now,” Prof Lee added. “When I started in the 1990s, nobody believed chemotherapy worked.”
“We now know about 20-30% [of patients] stay alive with stage four with immunotherapy and now we want to improve survival rates. So hopefully this mRNA vaccine, on top of immunotherapy, might provide the extra boost.”
“We hope to go on to phase two, phase three, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves lots of lung cancer patients. We have to try to push the boundary, and we’ve been pushing here for the last 30 to 40 years now. It’s a privilege to be involved in lung cancer research.”
Consultant medical oncologist Dr Sarah Benafif is leading the delivery of the study at UCLH. She said: “The strength of the approach we are taking is that the treatment is aimed at being highly targeted towards cancer cells.”
“In this way we hope that in time we are able to show that the treatment is effective against lung cancer whilst leaving other tissues untouched.”
In July 2023, the Government signed an agreement with BioNTech to provide up to 10,000 patients with precision cancer immunotherapies by 2030. Science minister Lord Vallance added: “It is good to see this vaccine taking its next important step.”
“This approach has the potential to save the lives of thousands diagnosed with lung cancer every year. We back our researchers so that they continue to be an integral part of projects that produce groundbreaking therapies, like this one.”