Ep.4 with Lennard Lee: Behind the headlines on cancer vaccines

This is a milestone moment for the field because for decades, everyone has been saying cancer vaccines are possible.

They can help someone's immune system recognize a cancer and attack it in a way that's much more precise, much safer than any previous methods.

And really what's happened over the last few years is that people have tried to make this a reality.

And it's all been kickstarted by what happened in 2020, where everyone realized that vaccines were cheap to make, easy to update.

And in the cancer field, they wanted to personalize it.

So what happened on the 19th of August? Well, this was a positive study.

What Merck and Monerda did was a phase three study.

That's the last phase of clinical testing before it goes out to patients across healthcare institutions across the world.

And this showed that for people with melanoma and they managed to get it removed, they cut it out, it stopped or reduced the likelihood of the cancer coming back.

And this was the first time a personalized vaccine has been shown to be effective in this setting.

And that's just simply incredible.

And I think that probably the other thing that makes this science fiction type moment, something that doctors didn't see coming, nor did patients, was that these were personalized vaccines.

And what do I mean by that? Well, everyone who gets cancer at the moment gets the same drug.

It's the same chemotherapy, the same radiotherapy.

the same targeted therapy.

It doesn't matter what your immune system was, doesn't matter what the cancer looks like, it's always the same.

For the first time, they made a drug which is designed for that patient, the mutations that they have, the immune system that they've inherited.

And so this potentially is a game changer in terms of cancer drugs because it's made for you.

It's really exciting.

And this trial was positive.

It was positive and it was at scale, right? I think there were 1,137 patients that successfully hit their primary and secondary endpoints, which were recurrent free survival and distant metastasis free survival.

Now that consolidated the success of their phase two results.

We haven't actually heard the actual detail of the endpoints that they hit yet.

But certainly the market has responded and Moderna's share price has more than doubled since then.

So it is, as you say, a thrilling moment.