--- title: Moderna Announces Success With mRNA Skin Cancer Vaccine description: Coming off the success of its mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, Moderna announced that it achieved encouraging results when it turned its vaccine technology against cancer. canonical: https://time.com/6240538/mrna-cancer-vaccine-moderna/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-12-13T14:46:50.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:06:04.619Z article:section: Health og:title: Moderna's mRNA Skin Cancer Vaccine Shows Early Promise in a New Study og:description: The company reported encouraging results from a small study og:url: https://time.com/6240538/mrna-cancer-vaccine-moderna/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt48df45207d90e19d/698a38bae6e84a6e262afad3/GettyImages-1230663586.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: In this illustration, a hand of a person seen holding a og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Moderna's mRNA Skin Cancer Vaccine Shows Early Promise in a New Study twitter:description: The company reported encouraging results from a small study twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt48df45207d90e19d/698a38bae6e84a6e262afad3/GettyImages-1230663586.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Moderna's mRNA Skin Cancer Vaccine Shows Early Promise in a New Study > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=9bb36ea0-5348-4295-9866-3b276c01294c&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer [Watch (HLS stream): The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W5jcvwLu.m3u8) (8:09)  _Published 2022-10-05. Scientists believe there is a future in which women can be vaccinated against breast cancer._  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Dec 13, 2022 2:46 PM UTC  Getty Images—SOPA Images/LightRocket  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Dec 13, 2022 2:46 PM UTC Coming off the success of its mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, Moderna announced on Dec. 13 that it achieved encouraging results when it turned its vaccine technology against cancer. The company reported in a [release](https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2022/Moderna-and-Merck-Announce-mRNA-4157V940-an-Investigational-Personalized-mRNA-Cancer-Vaccine-in-Combination-with-KEYTRUDAR-pembrolizumab-Met-Primary-Efficacy-Endpoint-in-Phase-2b-KEYNOTE-942-Trial/default.aspx) that among 157 people with stage 3 or stage 4 melanoma, a personalized cancer vaccine that Moderna developed with Merck—created using mRNA genetic material from each patient’s respective tumors—reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 44% compared to standard care. “For the first time ever, we have evidence that it’s possible to develop a functional immune response that can treat patients’ cancer from a randomized controlled trial,” says Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna. In the study, patients were randomly assigned to receive one of two treatments. One group was treated with the drug [pembrolizumab](https://time.com/4270345/immunotherapy-pembro-clinical-trials-cancer/), or Keytruda, an existing medication that releases the brake that the immune system normally has on attacking cancer cells, since cancer cells grow from the body’s own cells. The other group received Keytruda and a personalized cancer vaccine using mRNA technology. All of the patients had surgery to remove their melanoma, and for the vaccine group, Moderna scientists biopsied and genetically sequenced those tumors, then identified nearly three dozen genetic, personalized tumor flags, in the form of mRNA, for each patient’s immune system to recognize. These were then combined and injected in patients’ arms—in the same way that the COVID-19 vaccine delivered instructions to target the virus’ spike protein genes. Except in this case, the immune system was trained to target and destroy melanoma cells rather than a virus. In the trial, patients received up to nine doses of the personalized cancer vaccine. “It’s much easier for the immune system to get hold of a virus and prevent a viral infection than it is to destroy cancer,” says Hoge. “So it takes a lot more doses to get the immune system built up with the right force and strength against \[cancer\] antigens to impact a patient’s cancer.” --- ### More from TIME --- **Read More**: [_The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer_](https://time.com/6220114/breast-cancer-vaccine-development/) Patients were treated and monitored for at least two years. The company has only reported patient outcomes so far—not details of the vaccinated patients’ immune responses, such as their T-cell levels, which vaccines train to recognize and eliminate pathogenic cells. They are collecting that data and will provide that analysis in future presentations or publications. Hoge says the key to the vaccine’s success is that it was tailored to each patient’s tumor, allowing each patient to mount a precise and targeted response to their cancer. The flexibility of the mRNA technology makes that possible, as COVID-19 vaccine development demonstrated. New COVID-19 shots with different viral targets were created and manufactured in about six weeks by both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, makers of another mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. It also took about six weeks for Moderna’s scientists to generate each personalized mRNA cancer vaccine. Hoge says the patients will be followed for at least one more year, and possibly more after completing the treatment. The company’s scientists will monitor how long-lasting the immune response is, and how well it holds up to future recurrences or metastases. If the results are confirmed, Hoge says it may also be possible to use the vaccine in people at earlier stages of the disease, or even in people without melanoma who are at higher risk for it to prevent them from developing tumors in the first place. “We’re not there yet, and there is more work to do to figure out if we can push the 44% reduction even further,” he says. “But I do think this is a transformational moment for the field \[of cancer treatment\], for the company, and, we hope, for patients. We had a lot of success going after viruses, but nobody has ever demonstrated that mRNA vaccines could work in a randomized controlled trial in cancer. We are starting to show with data that they absolutely can, and that they can have a bigger impact in other fields than the one for which they became famous.” BioNTech has also been working on mRNA cancer vaccines since before the pandemic. Its scientists have tested versions of its vaccine in smaller studies without rigorous controls yet. ## Transcript Vaccines are often called The Miracle of modern medicine for their ability to Target the immune system against disease-causing, viruses and bacteria. Since they work against infectious diseases, why not against other conditions that have long plagued Humanity like cancer. To say we're working to develop a vaccine to prevent Cancers and individuals for the rest of your life. It sounds like Star Wars but it's not a concept that's totally unchartered me vaccines against human papillomavirus which is causative agent in certain types of human cancers. Work to prevent cancer in those individuals who get vaccinated and so are we? We no longer is nikoli more about the immune system in the last 20 years in the face of cancer. Studies and cancer. And now it's covid that we can bring this knowledge to this big goal of using a new system to prevent all types of cancers and and do so with humility and optimize the immune response against cancer by training cells to recognize tumors as foreign. Once that happens in breast cancer, it may be possible to not only prevent Prince's in people who have already had cancer, but to even prevent it in the first place, I was diagnosed in 1987 and I wasn't treated much differently from what the treatments or today. Oh, wow. Yes, there's a lot of focus on immunotherapy and that's exciting. It's exciting from a research perspective but it hasn't really made a difference in women's lives. Yet, we believe that a vaccine approach is certainly the key and primary prevention or preventing people from getting breast cancer to begin with because we believe that that is the future, that that is one of the areas that we should be focusing on now. We believe not only will it save lives, but it will also be less toxic than existing Therapies. You know, technologies that have have been developed over the past five to ten years. Are number one, immune checkpoint Inhibitors. So, immune checkpoint Inhibitors is a form of therapy that has been you know now approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in targeting a number of different cancers were, we had has been effective lasso in in certain tumors. And so, the reason that vaccines don't work against metastatic deposits of tumor is because the tumors themselves. Throw up a number of Walls that ultimately prevents the immune response from acting and killing the tumor. So the whole idea just like an infectious disease, vaccine used to identify what's foreign in the tumor as much as possible and to really craft A vaccine that targets what's foreign because that's really word. You know we're going to see the power of the immune response and in shrinking or preventing a cancer is having multiple targets within the tumor. But also having them be very foreign at the Mayo. Clinic Newton has developed a vaccine targeting, a very early form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma inside you or DC, is he is working with his colleague dr. Amy degnan to test that vaccine experts, have debated in recent years, whether dcis is actually cancer since it involves lesions that remain in the ducts of the breast tissue and don't spread throughout the breast as other forms of breast cancer. Do about 50 1,000 women. A year are diagnosed with DC is in the US and some of those cases will become cancerous. Although doctors, can't predict which one As a result many women with the condition up to have radiation and surgery to remove the lesions to avoid the risk of developing cancer. if the immune system could be trained to attack tcis instead that would potentially help women to avoid the more invasive treatments, which some experts believe might be over treating their condition We are interested in pushing forward, you know, toward a goal of vaccines for breast cancer prevention. And so one strategy to do that is to then evaluate a vaccine that we found was safe and women who had invasive cancer and apply it to women who don't have invasive cancer yet who have this dcis and evaluate what kind of immune response we see in those women. And one of the things that were specifically interested in this study to see is what kind of response do we see in the breast tissue after this vaccine is given, can we find evidence that the immune system is reacting to the vaccine and potentially, you know, trying to clear out these cancer cells in the breast tissue. So, in this trial, we give the vaccine for several doses of the vaccine before surgery, and women who have dcis. And then at the time of We're removing their dcis as we would not normally to treat it, but we're also able to then investigate the breast tissue and the area of DCs and and see what is happening with the immune response there after the vaccine, the team at the Abramson Cancer Center, at Penn Medicine, is studying a different approach to a breast cancer vaccine. They are currently a rolling about 16th bull who have been diagnosed with cancer and who have the genetic mutations, bcra one or bcra to which put them at higher risk of developing breast cancer to see if vaccinating them will lower their chance of recurrence. The researchers also had to study a couple dozen people with the genetic risk, but who has not yet been diagnosed with cancer to see if the vaccine could lower their risk of ever developing the disease. It's a, it's a game changer and we recognize that we have a ways to go. But right now, if you're a 25 year old woman who has undergone genetic testing and is told that you have a safe for me to yishun, you're talkin about raining for the rest of your life for your breasts or deciding to do a bilateral, mastectomy have your breasts removed and at this point we had no effective screening for ovarian cancer. And so we strongly recommend that individuals have their ovaries removed between ages, 35 and 44 a beer, signaling carrier, putting them into early menopause. And with all the attendant Dallas ring consequence that we really have not had great options apart from surgical options. And, you know, we're working on many different types of strategies to try alternative National the natural history. But this concept of immune interception being able to use the immune system to change the natural history for these individual is so critical. We are probably at the end of the era of using cancer, vaccines with great hope in a patient, whose party been treated with everything in the tumor is still Advanced to using these vaccines and all our new knowledge in patients, who are at risk for relapse or individuals who are simply a high risk for cancer and we want to prevent so prevention. 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