The rapid rise of the UK’s cancer vaccine trials

The UK is making progress in developing cancer vaccines, but there are still challenges ahead, Chris Baraniuk reports

The UK is on its way to becoming a hotbed of cancer vaccine trials. In May this year,1 it emerged that 30 British hospitals had signed up to be part of the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad,2 a scheme to enrol NHS patients in messenger RNA (mRNA) cancer vaccine trials. Just three months later, in August, a 67 year old man named Janusz Racz became the first person in the country to receive a new mRNA vaccine,3 as part of a clinical trial, for non-small cell lung cancer.

The vaccine, which was developed by the German biotechnology company BioNTech, is designed to present tumour markers to the patient’s immune system and thereby trigger an immune response that will target cancer cells specifically.4 In principle this reduces the risk of toxicity to healthy, non-cancerous cells. Chemotherapy, in contrast, often affects both cancerous and healthy cells.

Vaccine trials for melanoma5 and bowel cancer6 using BioNTech jabs are also currently active in the UK. Future trials could target a growing range of cancers, including breast cancer and head and neck cancers, among others.