Take us into the weeds how this is personalized vaccine and how it's made.

Each of our tumors is very unique, and the goal of a treatment like this in broad brushstrokes is to boost our own body's immune response against the specific aspects of the tumor that are unique to an individual such that our own immune systems can seek and destroy anything that looks like that tumor in our bodies.

And so what happens is that the tumor is removed from a patient, the DNA is sequenced, and the, there's a complicated computer algorithm essentially that determines what among the mutations that are present in the tumor are immunologically relevant in that not all the mutations in the tumor are relevant for an immune response.

But by seeing what genes are mutated in a tumor and what genes might be relevant to a, a productive immune response, an mRNA construct is made for that individual patient based upon characteristics of that individual patient's tumor, and then the patients receive this therapeutic vaccination.

And the theory is that this boosts that patient's immune response only against the aspects of the tumor that are within that patient's individual tumor.

And by having that enhanced immunity, that has been shown to protect that patient from future melanomas coming back.

Are the vaccines intended as a complementary treatment to existing ones, or could a vaccine therapy replace other types of drugs entirely?

In melanoma, this vaccine was tested with Keytruda because Keytruda is a current standard of care for this patient population that has had melanoma surgically removed and is at risk of recurrence.

Tell us about it and what we've learned from this, and how the vaccine actually works.

This is a huge advance for patients with melanoma, and also for, hopefully, all of medical science.

This vaccine works by when a patient has a tumor surgically removed, melanoma in this instance, in the laboratory we can study those tumors and see what's different about this tumor from all of the other cells in a patient.

And then a vaccine is made such that when that vaccine is administered to the patients in combination with a drug called Keytruda, it teaches the body's immune system to go and protect that body and fight against-

So it potentially opens it up to other cancers as well, right?

Exactly.

This principle has been demonstrated in melanoma first, but there's really no reason that this should only be considered a melanoma treatment.

Clinical trials are ongoing all around the world and in our institution, MSK, where we're testing these types of vaccine approaches in patients with lung cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer.

So if you could be specific, Dr. Postow, who will this treatment help the most? And when might patients be able to actually access this new treatment?

Right now, what we know about this treatment is that for patients with surgically removed high-risk melanoma, so that's stage 2B and higher surgically removed melanoma, this experimental personalized cancer vaccine in combination with an immune therapy drug called Keytruda was shown to prevent recurrences of melanoma more than Keytruda alone.

So right now, the efficacy has been established for patients with melanoma that have had high-risk melanoma removed surgically and preventing recurrences of their melanoma.

That's what we know about it right now.

But this platform really is not only about melanoma treatment.

This platform could be applied to many different types of cancer where surgery alone is often not curative.

And our hope is that in the future with additional clinical trials underway currently, patients that have surgery for other types of tumors will eventually have this type of an option, and that this ultimately will be shown to prevent their recurrences as well.

As a doctor who specializes in all of this, what do you want people to understand about this technology?

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 intismeran, 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 Keytruda was shown to reduce the risk of these patients having recurrent melanoma in the future compared to Keytruda alone.

Um, how important is it that this was an mRNA vaccine? Like could you have done this with a different vaccine, or is, was this technology the only way you could make something like this?

How significant is this development, this new vaccine?

I think this is a major breakthrough.

It's incredibly exciting for our patients with melanoma.

Melanoma is a very scary cancer.

Even with the best surgical resection of melanoma, unfortunately, a lot of patients will have recurrences.

And now we can tell these patients that we can make a vaccine just for them that in combination with Keytruda will decrease the risk that their melanoma will ever come back.

So this is a huge advance for patients with melanoma, and our hope, as we were hearing, is that this will be expanded in other contexts to many different types of cancers as well.

I- if you had your way, what kind of testing would you do to see what broader use this might have, this mRNA technology, to address other cancers?