The news that trials of the world’s first mRNA vaccine for lung cancer have begun in patients spread quickly in the previous days with experts talking about “groundbreaking” possibilities and expressing hope that it will be able to save thousands of lives. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with approximately 1.8 million deaths each year. Survival rates for people with advanced forms of the disease, where the tumors have spread, are particularly low.
Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech (the German company that co-developed the Covid vaccine with Pfizer), the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
Naftemporiki.gr contacted BioNTech asking the company to provide us with some information about the lung cancer vaccine trial and also to talk to us about its plans to use the technology it developed in other forms of cancer.
“This is the first treatment with our investigational mRNA-based cancer vaccine BNT116 in Britain. The clinical trial is investigating the personalized mRNA-based vaccine cancer candidate BNT116 in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Please note that the clinical trial is being conducted worldwide in countries such as the UK, Spain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and the USA. The first patient was treated in 2022 in Hungary. Advanced NSCLC still has a five-year survival rate of only 25% leaving patients with very limited treatment options. Based on mRNA technology developed over many years, our goal is to meet the medical needs in this area with new, innovative therapeutic approaches. BNT116 is one of the personalized therapies we are looking at, based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology. We are also evaluating product candidates based on the same technology in melanoma (BNT111) and head and neck cancer (BNT113), where the medical needs for new treatments are also very high. For BNT111 we just recently announced positive results in a phase 2 clinical trial. These data were a proof of success for our mRNA technology in oncology.”
