Potential brain cancer breakthrough in new Covid-like vaccine that trains the immune system to fight disease that killed Beau Biden

A pioneering new brain cancer vaccine can treat the most deadly and aggressive form of the disease, early research suggests.

The shot trains patients’ immune systems to fight malignant glioblastoma, the type of tumor that killed late senator John McCain and Beau Biden.

Like other experimental cancer vaccines being studied, it contains pieces of patients’ own tumors – meaning no two shots are the same.

These cancer particles are designed to look like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream, prompting the body to attack the remaining tumor in the brain.

The first human trial of the shot, tested on just four patients, found it triggers a strong immune response two days after injection.

It has been developed by researchers from the University of Florida and uses the same mRNA technology pioneered during Covid.

The breakthrough means scientists will now be able to test the vaccine on a larger group of brain cancer patients.

Some 24 people will be recruited to the next part of the trial.

Senior study author Elias Sayour, a UF Health pediatric oncologist, said: ‘In less than 48 hours, we could see these tumors shifting from what we refer to as ‘cold’ – immune cold, very few immune cells, very silenced immune response – to ‘hot’, very active immune response.

‘That was very surprising given how quick this happened, and what that told us is we were able to activate the early part of the immune system very rapidly against these cancers, and that’s critical to unlock the later effects of the immune response.’

Glioblastoma has an average survival of around 15 months, and the current standard of care involves surgery, radiation and some combination of chemotherapy.

Researchers say the discovery represents a potential new way to activate the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology similar to Covid-19 vaccines.

However, there are two key differences, the use of a patient’s own tumour cells to create a personalised vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

In the group of four patients, genetic material called RNA was extracted from each patient’s own tumor, and then messenger RNA, or mRNA – the blueprint of what is inside every cell, including tumor cells – was amplified.

It was then wrapped in the newly designed vaccine to make tumour cells look like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream and prompt an immune-system response.

The results of the trial mirror those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from naturally occurring brain tumours, and of clinical trials in mice.

Although it is too early to assess the clinical effects of the vaccine, the patients in the new trial either lived disease-free longer than expected or survived longer than expected.

Dr Sayour said: ‘I am hopeful that this could be a new paradigm for how we treat patients, a new platform technology for how we can modulate the immune system.

‘I am hopeful for how this could now synergize with other immunotherapies and perhaps unlock those immunotherapies.

‘We showed in this paper that you actually can have synergy with other types of immunotherapies, so maybe now we can have a combination approach of immunotherapy.

The research is published in the journal Cell, and comes after the trial for the world’s first personalized mRNA cancer jab for melanoma was announced.

The jab also has the potential to stop lung, bladder and kidney cancer.

It is custom-built for each person in just a few weeks, and works by telling the body to hunt down cancer cells and prevent the deadly disease from coming back.

A stage 2 trial of the jab, involving pharma firms Moderna and MSD, found it dramatically reduced the risk of the cancer returning in melanoma patients.