Reacción a "Pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck have announced preliminary successes in the Phase 3 trial of their personalised melanoma vaccine"

Personalised cancer vaccine:

“The vaccine has been developed to target mutations specific to each patient’s cancer. This in theory makes the vaccine safer (as only cancer cells, rather than normal cells, should have these mutations) and potentially more effective. 

What we know about these results:

“We know that the addition of V940 (personalised vaccine) to a standard therapy of pembrolizumab is better than pembrolizumab alone at preventing melanoma from coming back after surgery for patients with high-risk disease. How much better is not yet known until more data is released and at what cost is this gain? For example, how much more toxicity and/or cost does this add to standard therapy? If the benefit of adding V940 is small (e.g. a few percentage points), whilst the increase in toxicity or cost is high, then the impact of this treatment may be diminished. From the earlier phase 2 trial though, we know the combination treatment does not add much more toxicity to standard therapy, so this is likely to be the case for the phase 3 trial. 

How significant are these findings?

“This is the first phase 3 study to demonstrate improved recurrence-free survival and distant metastasis-free survival for a combination adjuvant treatment over anti-PD-1 (e.g. pembrolizumab) adjuvant therapy in melanoma which is significant in itself. How significant will depend on the details to be released later.”