Immunogenicity and Efficacy of Personalized Adjuvant mRNA Cancer Vaccines

Summary: In this issue, Gainor and colleagues report on the immunogenicity of personalized neoantigen-encoding mRNA vaccines that elicit measurable polyfunctional CD8+ and CD4+ T-cell responses in patients whose tumors have been resected. Reactivity is substantiated to 20% to 30% of the predicted MHC-I and MHC-II epitopes in four patients with NSCLC postsurgically treated with the vaccine alone and in 12 patients with melanoma treated with their individualized vaccines plus pembrolizumab in the context of a phase 1 clinical trial (NCT03313778). See related article by Gainor et al., p. 2209