Dr. Craig Slingluff, a professor of surgery at UVA, has spent years studying melanoma, which has become much more prevalent.
“About a hundred years ago the lifetime risk of melanoma was about one in 1,500, and now it’s about one in 50, so it’s quite common, and a lot of that probably relates to sun exposure practices that we have engaged in in more recent decades.”
Doctors tried a number of cancer treatments with limited success, but today they report remarkable progress with vaccines, created with a technology first used during the COVID pandemic.
“The immune system can recognize and commonly does recognize certain peptides on the surface of cancer cells. The hope is to boost the immune system’s response specifically to cancer – in this case melanoma – so that it can win those battles. With the success of COVID vaccines, primarily because of the MRNA technology, there’s been an effort to apply that to cancer vaccines.”
Slingluff’s lab developed a vaccine that reduced recurrence of the disease, and last month, drug-makers Merck and Moderna reported considerable success with customized vaccines based on mutations in individual patients’ tumors.
“There was a 42% reduction in the risk of recurrence over time with the vaccine when combined with an auto-immune therapy compared with that other immune therapy by itself.”
The problem with those customized treatments is that it takes 6-8 weeks to make the vaccines. Still, Slingluff is encouraged and hopes next year to have a different vaccine that can be used right away in more people.
“We’re adding some things to it to make it broader, including some mutated targets that are shared among different patients.”
Someday, he hopes science will produce a vaccine that can prevent a first occurrence of melanoma in those at high risk – people with fair skin, red hair, a history of sunburns or excessive sun exposure.
