The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is fast-tracking patients for its upcoming cancer vaccine trials — and each one will be tailored to every individual’s needs.
As The Guardian reports, patients who meet eligibility criteria need only sign off on having their blood and tissues sampled to gain immediate access to the vaccine trial, which will use cutting-edge mRNA technology to customize each jab to the DNA of the people getting them.
The NHS told the newspaper that dozens of people have already been enrolled in the program, called the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, and thousands more will be able to get into the trials at 30 sites around the UK. To start, the agency is looking for patients with bladder, colorectal, kidney, lung, skin, and pancreatic cancers, but more types will be added as the program progresses.
As more of these trials get up and running at hospitals across the country,” explained NHS England head Amanda Pritchard, “our national matchmaking service will ensure as many eligible patients as possible get the opportunity to access them.”
Announced ahead of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) conference in Chicago, the NHS program is working in tandem with German vaccine maker BioNTech, whose mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have paved the way for the technology to be applied to all manner of illnesses and diseases.
At the conference, BioNTech is also slated to present preliminary evidence on research suggesting that measuring circulating tumor DNA could help early detection of colorectal cancer, which accounted for an estimated 930,000 deaths globally in 2020 alone.
The program’s first patient, 55-year-old Elliot Pfebve is also suffering from colorectal cancer. As The Guardian reports, the man had no symptoms and only learned that he had it during a routine doctor’s appointment.
