Man receives world's first lung cancer vaccine

A man from London has become the first human to receive an experimental vaccine intended to prevent lung cancerOn Tuesday, doctors administered the initial dose of BNT116 to the 67-year-old man at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) in the United Kingdom. The messenger RNA (mRNA) immunotherapy is expected to “train” the man’s body to fight non-small cell lung cancer, which accounts for about 85% of lung cancer diagnoses worldwide.

While chemotherapy can help patients with localized or regional non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), it has two major drawbacks. The first is that it is often used in conjunction with other strategies, such as surgery or radiation therapy, making the treatment plan expensive, exhausting, and time-consuming. Chemotherapy also attacks living cells indiscriminately, often leading to organ damage, bone loss, nausea, and other troubling side effects.

These disadvantages have inspired researchers to come up with alternative therapies with less impact on the body and psyche. Vaccines, which teach the body how to fight a particular disease, are one such avenue. While some scientists at the German biotech company BioNTech are working to develop and test vaccines against pancreatic cancerOthers are trying to fight lung cancer with the body's own immune system.

Janusz Racz talks to consultant medical oncologists at UCLH before receiving BNT116.
Credit: Aaron Chown/PA

In a release On Friday, the NIHR reported that it had administered the first dose of BioNTech’s BNT116 for human use. The recipient, Janusz Racz, 67, was diagnosed with NSCLC in May and began chemotherapy and radiotherapy immediately afterward. Racz will receive six consecutive syringes, one five minutes after the other, once a week for six weeks. After that, he will receive an injection once every three weeks for 54 weeks. Racz’s oncology team hopes that BNT116 will prevent the cancer from coming back and prove that it is safe in humans.

Racz’s trial marks the start of a larger study in which approximately 130 participants will receive BNT116 across seven hospitals, including six in the UK. The study will cover different stages of non-small cell lung cancer, from early-stage cancer that has not been treated with surgery or radiotherapy to advanced-stage and recurrent cancer.

“The advantage of this approach is that the treatment is targeted at the cancer cells,” said Dr Sarah Benafif, an oncologist leading the study at University College London Hospitals (UCLH). “In this way, we hope that over time we can show that the treatment is effective against lung cancer without affecting other tissues.”