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Personalized Cancer Vaccines Are Almost Here—But Federal Funding Cuts Could Derail Them

scientificamerican.com · Jan 16

Vaccines based on mRNA can be tailored to target a cancer patient’s unique tumor mutations. But crumbling support for cancer and mRNA vaccine research has endangered this promising therapy

Shared by @tchambers and 26 others.

Fediverse Top Stories (@topstories) · Jan 18

Personalized Cancer Vaccines Are Almost Here—But Federal Funding Cuts Could Derail Them https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/personalized-mrna-vaccines-will-revolutionize-cancer-treatment-if-federal/

kcarruthers (@kcarruthers) · Jan 18

🔁 @cdarwin:

By May of this year another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus:

🔥mounting federal hostility to vaccines.

Senate Republicans convened a hearing entitled

“The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies,”

featuring the false claim that as many as three out of four deaths from COVID were caused by mRNA vaccines deployed to stop the pandemic.

(In fact, COVID vaccinations saved an estimated 2.5 million lives between 2020 and 2024,
according to a study published earlier this year.)

In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices,
which makes recommendations on federal vaccine policy.

He eventually replaced them with his own advisory committee,
which includes several anti-vaccine stalwarts.

Kennedy has also slashed research funding for mRNA vaccines.

In August he canceled nearly $500 million supporting the development of mRNA vaccines against viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and influenza.

The move intensified the fears of researchers who want to develop mRNA vaccines for other illnesses,
among them cancer.

After my visit to Memorial Sloan Kettering, Balachandran’s team shared a chart that plotted Brigham’s immune response to her personalized mRNA vaccine.

Along the bottom, triangles marked the dates of her surgery
and each of the nine doses of the vaccine she received over the course of a year.

Above them a cluster of brightly colored lines showed the share of her body’s
T cells targeting the specific mutant proteins in her cancerous tumor.

At first, when Brigham’s tumor was removed,
cells trained to go after each cancer clone were somewhere on the order of one in 500,000 T cells in her blood.

A few months after surgery,
when she’d had four doses of the vaccine,
the lines shot up almost vertically, showing that the most common cancer fighter at that point accounted for around one in 20 to one in 50 T cells
—an increase of more than 20,000-fold.

Those T cells dipped a bit in the months before Brigham’s last booster shot,
given almost a year after her tumor was removed.

But they remained in the same range even three years on.

A phase 2 clinical trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in a larger patient group is currently underway.

The vaccine for Brigham’s cancer was just nine tiny vials of liquid administered through an IV,
a private message that only her immune system was meant to decode.

But the effort that delivered that coded message was a deeply collective enterprise,
one that stretches back through the hundreds of thousands of tissue samples collected,
stored and analyzed at Memorial Sloan Kettering,
-- each one taken from the body of a patient who might not have survived their cancer.

Also in that vaccine were the contributions of generations of taxpayers who never got to see these results.

Perhaps their descendants will be able to beat the disease
—if society continues to support this vital work.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/personalized-mrna-vaccines-will-revolutionize-cancer-treatment-if-federal/

#micrometastases #neoantigens #driverantigens
#passengermutations #neoantigens #checkpointinhibitors #WilliamColey #immunotherapy #stroma #MHC

🎆🎉 Masto New Year 🎊🎇 (@mast0d0nphan) · Jan 18

🔁 @cdarwin:

Vaccines based on mRNA can be tailored to target a cancer patient’s unique tumor mutations.

But crumbling support for cancer and mRNA vaccine research has endangered this promising therapy

The results of Brigham’s trial were an early sign that mRNA vaccines may be effective for a wide variety of cancers:

Whereas pancreatic cancer is known for its low rate of mutations,
the earliest data on personalized mRNA vaccines came from studies of melanoma,
which researchers had targeted specifically because it tends to mutate so frequently.

An earlier phase 2 trial in patients with advanced melanoma found that for those who received both a personalized mRNA vaccine and so-called immune checkpoint inhibitors,
the risk of death or recurrence decreased by almost half compared with those who got only checkpoint inhibitors.

Ongoing companion trials are targeting kidney and bladder carcinomas
and lung cancer.

. In each case, the vaccine is additive:

administered after surgery and with standard drugs.

The shot’s job is to prime the immune system to recognize abnormal proteins arising from mutations
and attack any lingering malignancy that escaped conventional treatments
—or stamp out future recurrence.

Seeing promising results in fundamentally different kinds of tumors has motivated researchers to pursue personalized mRNA vaccines much more broadly.

In doing so, they’ve developed an approach at the nexus of several important trends,
pairing insights about our immune system’s response
to cancer
with advances in vaccine production spurred by the COVID pandemic,
the rise of algorithms powered by artificial intelligence,
and the plummeting cost of genetic sequencing.

Today there are at least 50 active clinical trials in the U.S., Europe and Asia
targeting more than 20 types of cancer.

A melanoma trial led by pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck has now reached phase 3,
the last step before a medicine can be approved for public consumption.

Personalized melanoma vaccines could be available as early as 2028,
with mRNA vaccines for other cancers to follow.

But the promise of this novel approach couldn’t have come at a more perilous time for the field.

🆘 In the first weeks of the second Trump administration,
U.S. cancer research was thrown into unprecedented turmoil as federal grants were terminated en masse.

According to one Senate analysis, funding from the National Cancer Institute was cut by 31 percent in just the first three months of 2025.

By March cancer researchers worried that mRNA vaccines were facing particular scrutiny.

⚠️KFF Health News reported that
#MichaelMemoli ,
acting director of the National Institutes of Health,
had asked that any grants, contracts or collaborations involving mRNA be flagged for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., best known prior to assuming that role as one of the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine campaigners.

🔥Suddenly, the optimism around personalized mRNA vaccines was overshadowed by a sense that the public investment that sustained cancer research was being dismantled piece by piece.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/personalized-mrna-vaccines-will-revolutionize-cancer-treatment-if-federal/

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COVID pandemic enters seventh year with no end in sight

boingboing.net · Jan 17

It's strange to think that the COVID-19 pandemic, which sent the world into lockdown seven years ago never ended. It continues to kill and cripple us, to this day. We…

Shared by @FediThing and 44 others.

Crow (@crow) · Jan 18

🔁 @datum:

Relatively major culture-maker Boing Boing is running the headline:

COVID pandemic enters seventh year with no end in sight

and the article is not ableist, not bullshit, not denying reality. Nice!

https://boingboing.net/2026/01/16/covid-pandemic-enters-seventh-year-with-no-end-in-sight.html

#BoingBoing #COVID #COVID19 #CovidIsNotOver #COVIDisAirborne

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He called himself an ‘untouchable hacker god’. But who was behind the biggest crime Finland has ever known?

theguardian.com · Jan 17

How would you feel if your therapist’s notes – your darkest thoughts and deepest feelings – were exposed to the world? For 33,000 Finnish people, that became a terrifying reality, with deadly consequences

Shared by @Lazarou and 19 others.

The Flight Attendant (@CosmicTraveler) · Jan 18

🔁 @SuffolkLITLab:

TL;DR: A massive data breach in Finland exposed the personal therapy notes of 33,000 individuals, leading to extortion demands from hackers. This incident highlights the severe consequences of cybersecurity risks in the mental health sector. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/vastaamo-hack-finland-therapy-notes #law #tech #legaltech ⚖️ 🤖 #autosum

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Worth reading

The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

joanwestenberg.com · Jan 17

In September 2016, the security journalist Brian Krebs had his website knocked offline by a botnet called Mirai. Hundreds of thousands of compromised devices, mostly cheap webcams and DVRs manufactured with default passwords that nobody ever changed, all simultaneously requesting his homepage. No...

Shared by @puercomal and 28 others.

Max von Webel (@343max) · Jan 18

🔁 @Daojoan:

The philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked that the fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I think the discourse has broken this relationship. It's not that intelligent people have become stupid. It's that the incentive structure of public conversation rewards cocksureness regardless of actual intelligence...

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-discourse-is-a-distributed-denial-of-service-attack/

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Worth reading

Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969

caimito.net · Jan 17

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders gro...

Shared by @Andres4NY and 12 others.

Thomas Sturm (@tsturm) · Jan 18

🔁 @tartley:

@peter Why we've tried to replace programmers every decade since 1969 https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2025/12/07/the-recurring-dream-of-replacing-developers.html

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Worth reading

The Dilbert Afterlife

astralcodexten.com · Jan 17

Sixty-eight years of highly defective people

Shared by @John and 11 others.

hnbot (@hnbot) · Jan 17

The Dilbert Afterlife
----
- 22 hours ago | 7 points | 0 comments
- URL: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife
- Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646475

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Dispatch from the occupation

donmoynihan.substack.com · Jan 17

What life is like in Minneapolis now

Shared by @nek and 20 others.

Hacker News Robot (@hackernewsrobot) · Jan 17

What life is like in Minneapolis now https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/dispatch-from-the-occupation

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Scientists Make Stunning Find Inside Prehistoric Wolf’s Stomach

404media.co · Jan 17

Scientists sequenced the genome of an extinct woolly rhinoceros that was found in a wolf belly that lived 14,400 years ago.

Shared by @chris and 14 others.

Chris ÁBRÁHÁM (@chris) · Jan 18

🔁 @acdha:

“Incredibly, scientists were able to sequence the genome of the rhino, which revealed that this individual still had a high level of genetic diversity in its lineage, and no signs of inbreeding. Considering that woolly rhinos vanished from the fossil record around 14,000 years ago, this study suggests that they may have experienced a very sudden population collapse, rather than a gradual demise.”
https://www.404media.co/scientists-make-stunning-find-inside-prehistoric-wolfs-stomach/

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Worth reading

Coding with LLMs can still be fun - Coding with Jesse

codingwithjesse.com · Jan 17

Do you love reviewing code other people wrote? Do you get a tickle of pure joy to find and criticize the mistakes and problems in sloppy code? Me neither.