Latest news with #OlayanCenterforCancerVaccines
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
TIME100 Health Panelists Talk ‘Curing Cancer'
Sara Sidner, anchor and senior national correspondent for CNN, told the audience at the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner on Tuesday night that she did 16 rounds of chemotherapy after she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2023—and worked the entire time through it. The room erupted into loud applause. 'It is possible to live your life while trying to kill cancer,' Sidner said. 'We've come such a long way, and I just quickly want to say to this room: whoever is in this room that is a nurse, a doctor, a physician, a researcher, someone who is creating drugs for us—thank you. Thank you for the research. Thank you for your work; we need it so, so much.' Sidner was joined onstage by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, surgeon-scientist and director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Victor Bulto, president of the U.S. unit for Novartis, which sponsored the event in New York City. The three appeared on a panel moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park to discuss the groundbreaking innovations in cancer detection, treatment, and prevention—and the research that still needs to be done. Sidner, who is a 2025 TIME Closers honoree, said she hadn't always planned on publicly sharing her cancer diagnosis. But when she learned she had stage III breast cancer, she realized she wouldn't be able to keep it a secret from everyone. 'You have spent your life telling other people's stories—maybe this is something you need to tell, and tell it in a really honest, sometimes embarrassing, way. Tell people what it's like going through this journey,' she recalled thinking. Balachandran, who is a 2025 TIME100 Health honoree, called cancer 'the most urgent health crisis of our lifetime.' In the United States, one in two men and one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer during their life, according to the American Cancer Society. Part of what's challenging, he said, is that cancer is 'an intelligent cell that is constantly programmed to evolve.' 'We have historically been treating it with drugs that do not evolve with an evolving cancer,' Balachandran said. 'Even though cancer is intelligent, we do not fight it with a medicine that is intelligent. We've always envisioned developing intelligent medicines to diagnose and treat cancer, but we have not really been able to achieve this goal.' Now, though, Balachandran said he thinks the health industry has made progress on this. New technologies, including AI, and research advancements—such as understanding how the immune system recognizes cancer—could help medical providers diagnose cancer earlier and treat cancer more effectively, Balachandran said. Balachandran has used mRNA technology to create personalized vaccines that research has indicated could boost patients' immune systems to help treat pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. Bulto said that it's imperative to continue making grounds on the medicine but also on understanding the patient experience. 'On the one hand, we have a lot to do on the science front, but also, the more we learn about the science, the more we are learning … that we have to become as good or as innovative in how we bring those medicines to patients as how innovative the medicines themselves are,' Bulto said. 'We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the lived experience of patients, the felt experience of patients.' He said that whatever innovations are developed for cancer treatment, it's critical to ensure they're distributed to all patients who need them—whether they live in New York City or in a rural community. At the same time that advancements are being made in the cancer field, research funding through the U.S. National Institutes of Health is at risk under the Trump Administration. Despite that, Balachandran said he is 'optimistic.' 'We've made so much progress, so it's really hard to stop this level of progress when results are really transformative and really sort of ushering in a next era of cancer care,' he said. 'If they work, how could you not support it? Because cancer is something that affects all of us.' To close out the discussion, Park asked the panelists: will we cure cancer? Balachandran replied immediately: Yes. 'We already are curing cancer,' he said. 'The question is: how more can we cure cancer, and how more effectively can we cure cancer, and how more simplistically can we cure cancer with less side effects or less medication, and for whom, and for more people?' 'The next revolution of cancer care is really about expanding access to more patients, expanding more treatments with less side effects for people,' he continued. Sidner and Bulto said they agreed with Balachandran, but Sidner added that it was critical to ensure that cancer is cured equitably. She pointed out that Black women are nearly 40% more likely than their white counterparts to die from breast cancer. 'Something's wrong there,' she said. 'And so for whom will cancer be cured is a huge question that needs to be addressed.' The TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of Health was sponsored by Novartis and FIGS. Contact us at letters@
Time Magazine
14-05-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
‘We Already Are Curing Cancer': TIME100 Health Panel Discusses How to Solve an ‘Evolving' Disease
Sara Sidner, anchor and senior national correspondent for CNN, told the audience at the TIME100 Health Impact Dinner on Tuesday night that she did 16 rounds of chemotherapy after she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2023—and worked the entire time through it. The room erupted into loud applause. 'It is possible to live your life while trying to kill cancer,' Sidner said. 'We've come such a long way, and I just quickly want to say to this room: whoever is in this room that is a nurse, a doctor, a physician, a researcher, someone who is creating drugs for us—thank you. Thank you for the research. Thank you for your work; we need it so, so much.' Sidner was joined onstage by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, surgeon-scientist and director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Victor Bulto, president of the U.S. unit for Novartis, which sponsored the event in New York City. The three appeared on a panel moderated by TIME senior health correspondent Alice Park to discuss the groundbreaking innovations in cancer detection, treatment, and prevention—and the research that still needs to be done. Sidner, who is a 2025 TIME Closers honoree, said she hadn't always planned on publicly sharing her cancer diagnosis. But when she learned she had stage III breast cancer, she realized she wouldn't be able to keep it a secret from everyone. 'You have spent your life telling other people's stories—maybe this is something you need to tell, and tell it in a really honest, sometimes embarrassing, way. Tell people what it's like going through this journey,' she recalled thinking. Balachandran, who is a 2025 TIME100 Health honoree, called cancer 'the most urgent health crisis of our lifetime.' In the United States, one in two men and one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer during their life, according to the American Cancer Society. Part of what's challenging, he said, is that cancer is 'an intelligent cell that is constantly programmed to evolve.' 'We have historically been treating it with drugs that do not evolve with an evolving cancer,' Balachandran said. 'Even though cancer is intelligent, we do not fight it with a medicine that is intelligent. We've always envisioned developing intelligent medicines to diagnose and treat cancer, but we have not really been able to achieve this goal.' Now, though, Balachandran said he thinks the health industry has made progress on this. New technologies, including AI, and research advancements—such as understanding how the immune system recognizes cancer—could help medical providers diagnose cancer earlier and treat cancer more effectively, Balachandran said. Balachandran has used mRNA technology to create personalized vaccines that research has indicated could boost patients' immune systems to help treat pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. Bulto said that it's imperative to continue making grounds on the medicine but also on understanding the patient experience. 'On the one hand, we have a lot to do on the science front, but also, the more we learn about the science, the more we are learning … that we have to become as good or as innovative in how we bring those medicines to patients as how innovative the medicines themselves are,' Bulto said. 'We have spent a lot of time trying to understand the lived experience of patients, the felt experience of patients.' He said that whatever innovations are developed for cancer treatment, it's critical to ensure they're distributed to all patients who need them—whether they live in New York City or in a rural community. At the same time that advancements are being made in the cancer field, research funding through the U.S. National Institutes of Health is at risk under the Trump Administration. Despite that, Balachandran said he is 'optimistic.' 'We've made so much progress, so it's really hard to stop this level of progress when results are really transformative and really sort of ushering in a next era of cancer care,' he said. 'If they work, how could you not support it? Because cancer is something that affects all of us.' To close out the discussion, Park asked the panelists: will we cure cancer? Balachandran replied immediately: Yes. 'We already are curing cancer,' he said. 'The question is: how more can we cure cancer, and how more effectively can we cure cancer, and how more simplistically can we cure cancer with less side effects or less medication, and for whom, and for more people?' 'The next revolution of cancer care is really about expanding access to more patients, expanding more treatments with less side effects for people,' he continued. Sidner and Bulto said they agreed with Balachandran, but Sidner added that it was critical to ensure that cancer is cured equitably. She pointed out that Black women are nearly 40% more likely than their white counterparts to die from breast cancer. 'Something's wrong there,' she said. 'And so for whom will cancer be cured is a huge question that needs to be addressed.'
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
mRNA vaccines show promise in pancreatic cancer in early trial
Personalized mRNA vaccines show promise as pancreatic cancer treatment, a phase 1 clinical trial published Wednesday in Nature found. Fewer than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest types of cancer. That is, in part, because around 90% of cases are diagnosed when the disease is already advanced. Pancreatic cancer cells also spread to other parts of the body much earlier on than in other cancers, which typically spread only when the original tumors are large. The disease typically doesn't cause symptoms until later stages and there isn't a routine screening for this cancer, such as a mammogram or colonoscopy. Once it's detected, there are few effective treatments. 'Although we have made significant progress in improving outcomes in many of the other cancers with newer waves of cancer treatments, these have not had much of an impact in pancreatic cancer,' said Dr. Vinod Balachandran, director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who led the trial. 'Survival rate has remained about 10% despite our best current treatments.' That highlights the desperate need for more options, he said, Before mRNA vaccines became widely used for Covid, researchers had already been developing the technology for cancer treatment. This version of the vaccines teaches a person's immune system to recognize and attack tumors, turning the immune system into a cancer-fighting machine. mRNA technology is currently being explored for melanoma and colorectal cancer and other solid tumors. To be effective, mRNA cancer vaccines have to produce a lot of T cells, a type of immune cell that protects the body against invaders. These T cells also need to last a long time in cancer patients and retain their ability to detect and fight off cancer cells. While this is a relatively straightforward feat when it comes to viruses, teaching a person's T cells to fight nonforeign cells that their body itself made is much more difficult. For pancreatic cancer, the task is monumental. For a vaccine to teach the body to recognize tumors, there have to be targets on those tumor cells that are unique, meaning they don't appear elsewhere in the body. Since tumors are created from mutations, these mutations, expressed as proteins on the surface of cancer cells, serve as the targets. Pancreatic cancers typically do not have many targets to choose from. It's been a widespread belief that this lack of mutations, which serve as targets for an mRNA cancer vaccine, would make pancreatic cancer a poor choice for the therapy. But the new study showed that assumption may be wrong. The trial was a longer follow-up to an initial 2023 trial that first tested the efficacy of the vaccines in a subset of people with pancreatic cancer. Phase 1 clinical trials are very early stages of research and are meant to determine whether a certain treatment is safe and shows promise of efficacy. The new trial included 16 patients with receptacle pancreatic cancer, meaning a surgeon can remove the tumors. This is a relatively rare occurrence in pancreatic cancer — only about 20% of pancreatic cancers are operable, which is the only treatment that can stop this type of cancer. Chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapies can shrink tumors or keep them from growing, but are not considered cures. In an even smaller percentage of people, surgery is possible without first shrinking the tumors with chemotherapy, Wolpin said. The cancer returns about half of the time. Balachandran and his team followed the 16 patients in the trial for up to four years. The participants first had their tumors removed sometime between 2019 and 2021. Then, the team used genetic material from each person's tumors to design personalized mRNA vaccines they hoped would teach the patients' immune systems to attack their cancer cells. In addition to the vaccine, all 16 people were also treated with the current standard of care — surgery, chemotherapy and an immunotherapy drug called atezolizumab. Half of the people in the study — eight of the participants — responded to the vaccine, producing T cells that targeted their tumors. The other half didn't respond to the vaccine. One of the most important aspects of using a person's immune system to fight their cancer is ensuring their response —in this case, the cancer-fighting T cells — have longevity. That way, they stay in the body, fighting off cancer cells that pop up, rather than only working for a short amount of time. In the people in the trial who did mount a response, the vaccine would give their cancer-fighting T cells an average lifespan of nearly eight years, the researchers estimated. They believe that about 20% of the T cells could potentially survive and function for decades. The longer the T cells survive, the better to protect against the cancer's return. Early trials are meant to test whether or not a treatment is feasible — in this case, if an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer could produce durable T cells. The findings suggest that it can. However, it's still unknown whether these T cells will extend a person's life and if so, by how much –– that is a task for the next phases of trials. Just two of the patients who had a response to the vaccine had their cancer return during the three-year follow- up, compared to seven of the eight who did not respond to the vaccine treatments. 'You have to take this with a little perspective, this is not treating hundreds of thousands of people,' said Dr. Brian Wolpin, director of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. 'The fact that they were able to use a vaccine to generate a response to new mutations that come up in the tumors, and then were able to show that this subsists, is promising.' Because pancreatic cancer cells are adept at spreading early on, some organs may be harboring undetectable cancer cells that don't show up on scans, meaning these tumors aren't treated. With vaccines, the immune system may be able to kill these cancer cells, as well as new ones that pop up, said Dr. Shubham Pant, a professor of gastrointestinal medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Very early on in pancreatic cancer development, 'cells can escape and set up shop somewhere else –– in the liver or in the lungs. They may be quietly sitting in those other organs and then come back,' he said. Despite the caveat of being a small group of patients and a very early trial, Pant said, the results are encouraging. Other research teams, including scientists at MD Anderson, are working on off-the-shelf mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer, meaning the vaccines have a target that is common in all pancreatic cancer tumors, rather than a personalized target based on a person's individual tumor. About 90% of pancreatic cancer cases include a mutation called KRAS, meaning nonpersonalized vaccines, which could be produced in bulk and would not require a piece of a person's tumor to create, could potentially be another option down the road. (These vaccines are also currently in very early stages of research). 'This gives us a little more confidence that once you get a T cell response, that it could be durable, it's not a shock response,' Pant said. 'If we can see this response stand up in bigger trials, that's really significant.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
19-02-2025
- Health
- NBC News
mRNA vaccines show promise in pancreatic cancer in early trial
Personalized mRNA vaccines show promise as pancreatic cancer treatment, a phase 1 clinical trial published Wednesday in Nature found. Fewer than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest types of cancer. That is, in part, because around 90% of cases are diagnosed when the disease is already advanced. Pancreatic cancer cells also spread to other parts of the body much earlier on than in other cancers, which typically spread only when the original tumors are large. The disease typically doesn't cause symptoms until later stages and there isn't a routine screening for this cancer, such as a mammogram or colonoscopy. Once it's detected, there are few effective treatments. 'Although we have made significant progress in improving outcomes in many of the other cancers with newer waves of cancer treatments, these have not had much of an impact in pancreatic cancer,' said Dr. Vinod Balachandran, director of the Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who led the trial. 'Survival rate has remained about 10% despite our best current treatments.' That highlights the desperate need for more options, he said, Before mRNA vaccines became widely used for Covid, researchers had already been developing the technology for cancer treatment. This version of the vaccines teaches a person's immune system to recognize and attack tumors, turning the immune system into a cancer-fighting machine. mRNA technology is currently being explored for melanoma and colorectal cancer and other solid tumors. To be effective, mRNA cancer vaccines have to produce a lot of T cells, a type of immune cell that protects the body against invaders. These T cells also need to last a long time in cancer patients and retain their ability to detect and fight off cancer cells. While this is a relatively straightforward feat when it comes to viruses, teaching a person's T cells to fight nonforeign cells that their body itself made is much more difficult. For pancreatic cancer, the task is monumental. For a vaccine to teach the body to recognize tumors, there have to be targets on those tumor cells that are unique, meaning they don't appear elsewhere in the body. Since tumors are created from mutations, these mutations, expressed as proteins on the surface of cancer cells, serve as the targets. Pancreatic cancers typically do not have many targets to choose from. It's been a widespread belief that this lack of mutations, which serve as targets for an mRNA cancer vaccine, would make pancreatic cancer a poor choice for the therapy. But the new study showed that assumption may be wrong. The trial was a longer follow-up to an initial 2023 trial that first tested the efficacy of the vaccines in a subset of people with pancreatic cancer. Phase 1 clinical trials are very early stages of research and are meant to determine whether a certain treatment is safe and shows promise of efficacy. The new trial included 16 patients with receptacle pancreatic cancer, meaning a surgeon can remove the tumors. This is a relatively rare occurrence in pancreatic cancer — only about 20% of pancreatic cancers are operable, which is the only treatment that can stop this type of cancer. Chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapies can shrink tumors or keep them from growing, but are not considered cures. In an even smaller percentage of people, surgery is possible without first shrinking the tumors with chemotherapy, Wolpin said. The cancer returns about half of the time. Balachandran and his team followed the 16 patients in the trial for up to four years. The participants first had their tumors removed sometime between 2019 and 2021. Then, the team used genetic material from each person's tumors to design personalized mRNA vaccines they hoped would teach the patients' immune systems to attack their cancer cells. In addition to the vaccine, all 16 people were also treated with the current standard of care — surgery, chemotherapy and an immunotherapy drug called atezolizumab. Half of the people in the study — eight of the participants — responded to the vaccine, producing T cells that targeted their tumors. The other half didn't respond to the vaccine. One of the most important aspects of using a person's immune system to fight their cancer is ensuring their response —in this case, the cancer-fighting T cells — have longevity. That way, they stay in the body, fighting off cancer cells that pop up, rather than only working for a short amount of time. In the people in the trial who did mount a response, the vaccine would give their cancer-fighting T cells an average lifespan of nearly eight years, the researchers estimated. They believe that about 20% of the T cells could potentially survive and function for decades. The longer the T cells survive, the better to protect against the cancer's return. Early trials are meant to test whether or not a treatment is feasible — in this case, if an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer could produce durable T cells. The findings suggest that it can. However, it's still unknown whether these T cells will extend a person's life and if so, by how much –– that is a task for the next phases of trials. Just two of the patients who had a response to the vaccine had their cancer return during the three-year follow- up, compared to seven of the eight who did not respond to the vaccine treatments. 'You have to take this with a little perspective, this is not treating hundreds of thousands of people,' said Dr. Brian Wolpin, director of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. 'The fact that they were able to use a vaccine to generate a response to new mutations that come up in the tumors, and then were able to show that this subsists, is promising.' Because pancreatic cancer cells are adept at spreading early on, some organs may be harboring undetectable cancer cells that don't show up on scans, meaning these tumors aren't treated. With vaccines, the immune system may be able to kill these cancer cells, as well as new ones that pop up, said Dr. Shubham Pant, a professor of gastrointestinal medical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Very early on in pancreatic cancer development, 'cells can escape and set up shop somewhere else –– in the liver or in the lungs. They may be quietly sitting in those other organs and then come back,' he said. Despite the caveat of being a small group of patients and a very early trial, Pant said, the results are encouraging. Other research teams, including scientists at MD Anderson, are working on off-the-shelf mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer, meaning the vaccines have a target that is common in all pancreatic cancer tumors, rather than a personalized target based on a person's individual tumor. About 90% of pancreatic cancer cases include a mutation called KRAS, meaning nonpersonalized vaccines, which could be produced in bulk and would not require a piece of a person's tumor to create, could potentially be another option down the road. (These vaccines are also currently in very early stages of research). 'This gives us a little more confidence that once you get a T cell response, that it could be durable, it's not a shock response,' Pant said. 'If we can see this response stand up in bigger trials, that's really significant.'
