Cancer Vaccine Produces 49 Percent Melanoma Reduction in Patients
- By BSTQ Staff
A study led by New York University (NYU) researchers at the Perlmutter Cancer Centers has found the combination of a vaccine and a drug, which both harness the immune system to attack cancer cells, is successful in cutting the risk of skin cancer recurrence and death by 49 percent. This reduction was calculated five years after patients had their tumors surgically removed and remains unchanged.
In the Phase IIb trial, known formally as KEYNOTE-942, the researchers tested the vaccine, called intismeran, in combination with mainstay immunotherapy pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in 107 patients who had been randomly chosen after melanoma surgery to determine whether the combination therapy prevented their cancer from recurring. Intismeran is a personalized immunotherapy strategy that is developed with information from a patient’s individual tumor. These results were compared with those from a randomly selected group of 50 melanoma patients who had only received pembrolizumab postoperatively, a current standard of care.
After five years of follow-up, 68.8 percent of patients who were administered the combination therapy remained cancer free while 49.1 percent of the patients in the pembrolizumab-only group had no signs of cancer.
According to an NYU media release said, “This means that adding intismeran to pembrolizumab reduced the risk for recurrence or death by 49 percent. The combination therapy also reduced the risk of distant metastasis — the spread of cancer to another part of the body — by 59 percent. Overall survival, meaning no death from cancer or any other cause, was 92.2 percent for the vaccine with immunotherapy group, while for the immunotherapy-alone group it was 71.3 percent.”
“Our study offers strong evidence to melanoma patients that intismeran vaccine therapy, when used in combination with immunotherapy, can demonstrably reduce their risk of having their cancer return and improve clinical outcomes,” said study senior investigator Janice Mehnert, MD, a professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
References
Cancer Vaccine Produces 49% Melanoma Reduction in Patients Five Years Later. Good News Network, June 7, 2026. Accessed at www.goodnewsnetwork.org/cancer-vaccine-produces-49-melanoma-reduction-in-patients-5-years-later.