Groundbreaking treatments and vaccines offer hope in fight against cancer

Geoff Bennett:

There have been several promising developments lately in cancer research and treatment, including a new drug approved by the FDA this past week for advanced pancreatic cancer.

Our William Brangham has more.

William Brangham:

That's right.

Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the deadliest types of cancer. Its five-year overall survival rate is just 13 percent. But this new pill called daraxonrasib nearly doubled the survival time for patients and had fewer severe side effects than other treatments.

For more on this, we are joined by Dr. Robert Vonderheide. He directs the Abramson Center at Penn Medicine and is the president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Dr. Vonderheide, thank you so much for being here.

A very exciting week for cancer news. Specifically, on this pancreatic cancer drug, how successful do you think this treatment will be?

Dr. Robert Vonderheide, Abramson Cancer Center Director, Penn Medicine:

I think we have only seen the beginning. The FDA approved this drug for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, doubling their survival and really offering incredible hope and excitement for our patients and their families.

Now the opportunity exists to bring this particular drug forward to patients in earlier stages or just after they have been diagnosed. I think we will see this type of medicine have a huge impact and hopefully reverse those statistics that you cited just a moment ago.

William Brangham:

I understand this medication specifically targets the gene mutations that can spur pancreatic cancer cells to grow. Why has that intervention not been possible in the past?

Dr. Robert Vonderheide:

Yes, you're talking about the RAS oncogene, which is the mutated engine that drives pancreatic cancer and many other tumor types as well, and it's been very difficult to drug and block and inhibit with conventional chemistry.

What's happened here is a brand-new type of chemistry, really unprecedented. We call it molecular glue that gums up this mutated engine room as it spins on a flywheel, just bringing it to a halt. It really took basic chemistry and basic research to find a new way forward, and that's what we see being delivered for our patients this week.

William Brangham:

So the other big development is that there was this a new individualized vaccine that helps people with melanoma, which is a type of skin cancer, to live longer. Can you explain how that vaccine works?

Dr. Robert Vonderheide:

So, this news was announced from the companies involved in building that mRNA vaccine, indicating that their clinical trial has a positive result. It's not yet FDA-approved.

What we're learning is these are patients with melanoma who are in remission, but at risk for relapse, and the vaccine given at that time lowered the chances of a patient relapsing, just an incredible breakthrough at the power of the immune system being generated against the very mutations that are found in the tumors themselves.

William Brangham:

You mentioned that this is still in clinical trials and not been approved yet. Are there -- what else do you want to see from those results before you really cheer extremely loudly about this news?

Dr. Robert Vonderheide:

Well, we're cheering pretty loudly because we have been following this for a long time, and some of the early results have been presented in detail.

But we soon will hear the full data report from the companies, we believe. And we're looking for two things. What is the magnitude effect? How much has survival been impacted and increased? What will this mean for the individual patient?

And, second, does it work as designed? Does it generate the T-cell immune response, as we think it does? And can that be mobilized to an even greater extent with improving the vaccine going forward? So, both clinical and scientific data, we look forward in the coming weeks.

William Brangham:

I mean, I know this has been the dream of immunology to be able to get a vaccine to do this. Do you think we will see more types of these interventions for different kinds of cancers in the -- down the road?

Dr. Robert Vonderheide:

A hundred percent. This is the first of what I think will be a wave of cancer vaccines, lowering the chance of relapse, recurrence, perhaps one day even preventing certain types of cancer from ever appearing at all.

This is really the power of the immune system, which over the last 10 years we have learned to harness in a safe way. It's a breakthrough because we don't have this type of modality yet. And so that's why the news this week was so exciting.

William Brangham:

You mentioned that this was an mRNA vaccine, and we should note that the FDA did just approve an mRNA flu vaccine for the first time.

But we have heard concerns from HHS Secretary Kennedy about mRNA technology. For our audience that might have heard those expressions of concern, is there something there? Do we need to worry about them?

Dr. Robert Vonderheide:

Well, mRNA vaccines were first developed for the COVID pandemic, as we all know. Hundreds of millions of individuals received that vaccine with really detailed safety data.

I think what we're looking at is a technology that is highly effective, not just against COVID, but also against influenza and now perhaps, as we just talked about, cancer. The power of mRNA as a medicine, whether as a vaccine or in other ways, is unprecedented. It's before us.

And I think we should all take huge advantage to what mRNA can do to improve the health of our patients.

William Brangham:

All right, that is Dr. Robert Vonderheide at the Abramson Center at Penn Medicine.

Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Robert Vonderheide:

Thanks, William.