Study Finds COVID mRNA Vaccines Boost Cancer Treatment

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow.

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Today on the podcast, how mRNA vaccines help fight cancer.

ERIC TOPOL: We don’t see that very often. This is big stuff. And in fact, usually, when you see this, you say, oh, this is too good to be true. But you know what? I think it’s true, and we should take advantage of it even now.

IRA FLATOW: Over the last five years, billions of people have received at least one dose of the COVID mRNA vaccine. These work by triggering an immune response in the body meant to fight COVID-19 infection. Besides being effective against COVID, the vaccine appears to have an unanticipated result. It seems to make cancer treatments more effective. And many vaccinated patients have lived longer than their unvaccinated counterparts.

This news comes at a time when the federal government is slashing funding for mRNA research. Joining me to talk about this finding are my guests, Dr. Adam Grippin, radiation oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas; Dr. Eric Topol, cardiologist and genomics professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Welcome both of you to Science Friday.

ADAM GRIPPIN: Thanks so much for having us.

ERIC TOPOL: Thanks, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. I want to begin with you, Dr. Grippin. Can you tell us exactly what you found in this study?

ADAM GRIPPIN: Yeah, so we looked back at over a thousand patients who were treated for cancer with immune therapies at MD Anderson. And what we found was that those patients who happened to receive a COVID mRNA vaccine around the time they received their immune therapy lived significantly longer than patients who did not receive the COVID vaccine. We then studied this in animal models and think we now understand how this happens.

IRA FLATOW: What kinds of cancer patients and cancers are you talking about here?

ADAM GRIPPIN: We focus specifically on patients with lung cancer and melanoma, because those are some of the most common cancers that are treated with immune-directed therapies.

IRA FLATOW: And you say they lived longer and much longer. Give me an idea.

ADAM GRIPPIN: So when we looked at the number of patients in each of the groups that were alive three years after they started treatment, it was about double the chance of being alive at three years in the patients who happened to receive a COVID-vaccine in this new, unique window of time.

IRA FLATOW: You must have been surprised by this, I imagine.

ADAM GRIPPIN: Well, we were very excited by the result. We had been working on this story for about 10 years. And this was really validation of the idea that you could use an mRNA vaccine to help patients’ immune systems target their cancers and start killing tumor cells.

IRA FLATOW: Now, you said that you learned how it worked. Can you tell us about that?

ADAM GRIPPIN: So what we found is that the COVID mRNA vaccine essentially acts like a siren. And it can wake up the immune cells inside the tumor. And when they do this, those immune cells start training other immune cells to kill the cancer.

IRA FLATOW: Do you have enough information to say for sure that these results are because of the COVID vaccine?

ADAM GRIPPIN: Yeah, that’s a great point. So our data is exciting, but it’s still preliminary. So we need to validate these findings in randomized clinical trials before we apply these results in the clinic. And so that’s why we’re planning a randomized phase III clinical trial now, which will really tell us whether these vaccines should be used in patients with cancer.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Topol, I know you were not part of this research. What’s your reaction to it?

ERIC TOPOL: Ira, I was really impressed because this is a standout paper. The mechanism that Adam touched on is independent of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So any mRNA vaccine did this. And basically, it unleashed the interferon, type I interferon immune response, our, you know– first line of defense of our immune system. And that changed tumors from cold to hot.

Now, why would you want a hot tumor? Well, because when you give immunotherapy, it’s looking for all these PD-1 receptors. And this teed it up for the success of immunotherapy. And it may well work with many other types of our immunotherapy-sized checkpoint inhibitors. So this is a big finding. And we know it’s replicated from Scripps Clinic work that Adam has collaborated with our group that has been submitted for publication.

So this doubling of survival, this section of the mechanism, this is a real jump for cancer therapy. Because the treatment of cancer in solid tumors is still a ways off from what we want to achieve. And this is a step certainly in the right direction.

IRA FLATOW: So this is like a game changer, it sounds like. Would you describe it that radically?

ERIC TOPOL: Yeah. I mean, I think we haven’t seen that many big changes in cancer success like this. And here, it’s coming at a time, Ira, as you well know, where the mRNA vaccines are under assault, with the fundings being cut. And we have another breakthrough, a silver lining of what we’re learning from the pandemic. So yeah, this is big. It isn’t a standalone. That’s what people, I think, get confused, that you give a COVID vaccine and that’s going to help treat cancer. It’s only in conjunction with immunotherapy.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. And Dr. Grippin, is it possible that any mRNA vaccine could be having this effect on these patients?

ADAM GRIPPIN: Yes, so when we have looked in our animal models, we found that any messenger RNA gives you a similar effect. And we’re currently developing mRNA vaccines that we think will be even more effective. There’s no reason to think the COVID mRNA vaccine is the best possible vaccine at doing this because it wasn’t really designed for this. And so in the lab, we’re designing better vaccines that we think may be even more effective in our patients.

ERIC TOPOL: Ira, this is a key point because we are stagnant in our mRNA vaccine. We have never advanced since the beginning, in 2020. And whereas, for example, in Japan, they have self-amplifying mRNA, which have much bigger effects, there’s so many things you can do with the nanoparticles, as well as the mRNA itself to scale this up.

But even the work that Adam and his team did– and they looked at healthy volunteers with the COVID vaccines– they had a 280-fold increase in type I interferon, which is amazing. But we can do much better. We can get into the thousands fold with the right tweaks of this mRNA platform.

IRA FLATOW: Yet it’s coming at a time when the government is cutting back on mRNA research. Where is that money going to be coming from?

ERIC TOPOL: This is one of the most important, you could say, momentous discoveries in biomedical history. Not only did it save millions of lives in the pandemic, but now we’re seeing an extension of that, which was not foreseen. There’s no way to reconcile your question, Ira. I mean, this is– it’s going to just wind up being a significant delay before we get back deep into this whole platform’s advantages.

IRA FLATOW: Or will other countries pick up on this?

ERIC TOPOL: Absolutely. China’s all over it. Japan, as I mentioned, Europe– we’ll be watching them make some jumps. And remember, too, that the mRNA platform, it isn’t just for helping cancer. We’ve seen it now for autoimmune diseases, for genome editing, to enhance the delivery of all the types of genome editing, and even neurodegenerative disease. So there’s cardiovascular. There’s so many applications. And we’re missing by having the funding get gutted.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Grippin, you mentioned that there might be human trials on the horizon?

ADAM GRIPPIN: Yes so we’re currently planning a phase III randomized clinical trial to test this vaccine in patients. Our data is very exciting. But we’ve learned in medicine, over the last decades, that we really need to test these things very carefully in randomized studies before we change the way we treat patients. And so we’re excited to get this study done very quickly, so we can very quickly move our findings into clinic.

IRA FLATOW: Because I’m sure our listeners, when they’re hearing this– and they may have cancer, and their first thought is going to be, well, how am I going to get involved in this? How many years are we talking about here?

ADAM GRIPPIN: Yeah, so we’re working on how to do this. As you can imagine, we’re getting questions from around the world, from physicians and patients about how to implement these findings. And our stance has been somewhat cautious. We’re extremely excited about these results. And I don’t think there’s anyone more excited about moving this forward than I am. But I’d also just encourage patients to discuss these findings with their clinicians and identify what the most appropriate treatment is for them.

IRA FLATOW: Unintended consequences on the good side here.

ERIC TOPOL: Yeah, I don’t see how you could go wrong. I mean, it’d be nice to get this randomized trial that Adam’s going to forge ahead with. But in the meantime, this is big. We don’t see this type of cancer improve results, which have been replicated not in the initial report. We don’t see that very often. This is big stuff. And in fact, usually, when you see this, you say, oh, this is too good to be true. But you know what? I think it’s true, and we should take advantage of it even now.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Of course, you should check with your doctor before you–

ERIC TOPOL: Yeah. I mean, it’d be great to have a randomized trial, but that may be hard to get done in a short period of time. And I don’t know– if I was a cancer patient, I don’t know that I’d want to be randomized to placebo.

Ira, one other thing that’s really interesting– there’s been a big movement towards these personalized neoantigen vaccines, such as for melanoma or pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer. But here, you have a potential off-the-shelf. You don’t have to get it personalized and find all the proteins on that person’s cancer cell surface. So it could either be used in conjunction with those personalized vaccines, or perhaps even without having to go through that great, laborious work and expense.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Grippin, you talked about having theories about this about, what, 10 years ago, and now you’re looking into it. What was the tell that said, hey, we should look into this for cancer?

ADAM GRIPPIN: Yeah, so the idea for this started about 10 years ago in 2016, when I was working on developing a personalized mRNA nanoparticle vaccine with the group at the University of Florida. And we ran an experiment that was designed to show how important it was that we personalize the vaccine. And what we were surprised to find was that any mRNA, even if it wasn’t personalized, generated profound anti-tumor immune responses.

And so we have been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about that experiment day and night for 10 years, and we really didn’t have the opportunity to test it until the pandemic hit. And that provided the perfect opportunity to test this idea that an mRNA vaccine targeting a non-tumor protein might have anti-tumor effects.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. So basically, as Dr. Topol would say, it wakes up the immune system. Would that be fair, Dr. Topol?

ERIC TOPOL: That’s a good way to summarize it. It sensitizes, for the real immunotherapies we have today, a really big, unexpected benefit.

IRA FLATOW: Considering what’s in the news these days about medicine and the state of where we are, it’s so great to have some positive information and some hope at least about health care here, you know?

ERIC TOPOL: Absolutely. And especially to defy the anti-science, anti-vaccine stuff that’s out there that’s unfounded, this is a really big way to ante up.

ADAM GRIPPIN: My hope is that– these findings really suggest that we could develop an off-the-shelf vaccine that could be administered to many patients the day they’re diagnosed with cancer. My hope is that we could implement these therapies as off-the-shelf therapies in patients that could awaken their immune system to respond better to immune therapy. And then we could partner these with personalized vaccines down the road to bring in the rear, bring in reinforcements of the immune system to really sustain the immunologic attack against their cancers.

IRA FLATOW: Do you think that private drug companies are going to buy in on this now?

ERIC TOPOL: Well, I think they want to see success. And if they want to do that, this is a very easy, inexpensive way to amp it up. So I would say, yes, Ira. These companies like Moderna, Pfizer, other mRNA manufacturers, this is an easy one for them because they’re going more into cancer. And this ought to help.

IRA FLATOW: OK. This is terrific, hopeful news. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Adam Grippin, radiation oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston; Dr. Eric Topol, cardiologist and genomics professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

ERIC TOPOL: Thank you.

ADAM GRIPPIN: Thanks, Ira. Appreciate the opportunity.

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IRA FLATOW: This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. See you next time. I’m Ira Flatow.

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