Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Keeps 7 Patients Alive After 6 Years

When Donna Gustafson turned yellow with jaundice during a trip to Australia in 2019, doctors delivered devastating news: she had pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

Nine days after flying home to Florida, the then-67-year-old had surgery to remove her Stage 2 tumor. Then her doctors offered something that had never been tried before: a personalized mRNA vaccine designed specifically for her cancer.

"It was a no-brainer," Gustafson said. "I knew that statistically, the odds were against me."

She became the first person ever to receive an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer in February 2020. Six years later, she's cancer-free and recently hiked Mount Etna in Italy to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary.

The vaccine works completely differently from traditional treatments. Instead of eliminating existing tumors, it trains the immune system to hunt down and destroy any lingering cancer cells before they can grow back.

Patients in the trial still had surgery to remove their tumors. Then researchers analyzed each person's unique cancer cells and created a customized vaccine targeting their specific disease.

Half of the 16 patients in the small trial generated powerful immune responses after nine vaccine doses. New data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research shows that seven of those eight responders are still alive six years later, along with two who didn't respond to the treatment.

"The most important finding here is that the people who mount a response to the vaccine live longer than those who do not," said Dr. William Freed-Pastor of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the study.

Why This Inspires

Pancreatic cancer has long been considered nearly impossible to treat with immunotherapy. Only 20% of cases can even be operated on, and fewer than 13% of patients survive five years.

But this trial proves that patients can generate "potent" immune responses against one of the toughest cancers. The vaccines appear to create two types of cancer-fighting cells: "killer T cells" that attack tumors directly, and "helper T cells" that keep the immune response going strong for years.

Dr. Vinod Balachandran, who led the trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, called the sustained response remarkable. "This is one of the hardest cancers to generate any immune response, let alone such a potent one," he said.

Drugmakers Genentech and BioNTech have already launched a larger Phase 2 trial based on these promising results. Researchers are now working to understand exactly how the two types of T cells team up to create such lasting protection.

For Gustafson, now 72, the vaccine gave her something precious: time with her family and the chance to keep making memories.