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Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said that his company's experimental vaccine against melanoma could be available in as little as two years, in what would amount to a landmark step against the most serious form of skin cancer, Report informs referring to AFP.
Globally there were an estimated 325,000 new melanoma cases and 57 ,000 deaths from the disease in 2020.
"We think that in some countries the product could be launched under accelerated approval by 2025," he said in an interview.
Unlike conventional vaccines, so-called therapeutic vaccines treat rather than prevent a disease. But they also work by training the body's own immune system against the invader.
Therapeutic vaccines today represent a real hope in oncology, an "immunotherapy 2.0," according to Bancel.
Moderna's aspirations received a boost Thursday with the latest clinical trial results showing an improvement over time in the chances of survival thanks to the vaccine, which uses the same messenger RNA technology that proved highly effective against serious forms of Covid-19.
In a study involving 157 people with advanced melanoma, the Moderna vaccine in combination with Merck's immunotherapy drug Keytruda reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49 percent over a period of three years, compared with Keytruda alone.
Moderna had already announced two-year monitoring results last year, which showed a risk reduction of 44 percent.
