A new vaccine that targets the immune system to recognize and fight lung cancer is being tested on UK patients in a world-first trial, it was revealed in London Friday.
The treatment similar to covid vaccines is expected to improve survival rates for people fighting the disease that kills 35,000 a year in Britain alone.
Scientist Janusz Racz, who was diagnosed with the condition in May, was the first to get the BNT116 jab.
He had six injections five minutes apart on Tuesday at a University College Hospital clinic on Tottenham road in London.
Consultant oncologist Slow Ming Lee, a professor, said it was the next big phase of cancer treatment after chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
“This technology has moved on incredibly fast,” he said. “It is simple to deliver and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them.”
Like the vaccines that played critical role in containing the covid pandemic, this treatment made by BioNTech uses mRNA molecules that cells can read like a recipe for building antibodies.
The jab presents the immune system with strands of RNA containing markers from non-small cell lung cancer – the most common type – to ready it to spot and kill rumours.
Unlike chemotherapy, this treatment leaves healthy cells untouched.
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“We know it is well tolerated for our covid vaccine patients, so we hope it will be well tolerated for cancer patients,” the professor said. “We have been through chemotherapy. We have been through the standard immunotherapy treatment for some lung cancer patients.
“We have got personalized treatments using EHFR (epidermal growth factor receptor). But now we just want to add on another additional immune approach attack and we hope it is a success.”
The current trial will take place across 34 research sites in seven countries with six of them located in England and Wales.
It is hoped about 130 lung cancer patients will be enrolled, 20 of whom will be based in the UK.
Each of the jabs received by the first patient contained different RNA strands. The patient will have regular follow up injections for more than a year.
Racz, the Polish born artificial intelligence scientist who is one of the first patients being administered with the jab lives in London and he found out by accident that he had lung cancer in February after going for a CT colonoscopy.
He had a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy that doctors said gave him a 35 per cent chance of surviving for five years, compared with five months without treatment.
The jab should further boost his chances and he said he was happy to volunteer because of profession.
According to him, “the progress of science lies in people agreeing to be involved in such investigations.” The keen runner is hoping to compete in the London marathon
