A new study in mice shows promise for mRNA vaccines to treat cancers.

By Collin France

Physicians choose unique cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation based on each patient’s case, with the goal of eliminating cancer or extending survival. These treatment methods can be effective and often are the best options for very sick patients. But they often have lasting effects such as weakening the body’s natural defenses, nerve damage, altered brain function and more — without helping the body to prevent cancer returning in the future.  

There’s another way to treat cancer that has minimal long-term effects on patients and possesses a preventative component to combat a return of an old cancer or the growth of a new tumor. A new study out of the University of Florida, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in July 2025, brings this one step closer. 

The study was led by Elias Sayour, MD, PhD, a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics and principal investigator of its RNA Engineering Laboratory with a multi-national group of co-authors. They found that a new type of cancer vaccine, tested in mice, helped the body’s natural defenses recognize and fight cancer, whether the vaccine was tuned to a particular animal’s cancer or not. Currently tests in both animals and humans are in progress with hopes that this off-the-shelf vaccine will be an effective treatment for cancer patients. 

Immunotherapies are cancer treatments that use the body’s own defense system to combat cancer. One common type of immunotherapy, called immune checkpoint inhibitors, works by releasing the brakes on certain cells. These brakes normally prevent these defense cells from attacking the body’s own tissues. By blocking these constraints, the treatment allows the body’s defense cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells more effectively.

The problem is that many of the cancers that patients develop have unique ways of concealing themselves from the defense systems’ detectors. As a result, immune checkpoint inhibitors do not work well in many patients.  

“Every cancer is an orphan disease because not one cancer is identical to another,” Sayour said. “This creates a challenge when you are trying to make a treatment for all patients.” 

Researchers hoped to find a way to alarm the body’s defenses, so that immunotherapy treatments like immune checkpoint inhibitors could effectively do their intended job. Sayour’s team discovered this was possible using a new type of vaccine that was developed to combat COVID-19. These vaccines used tiny pieces of genetic instructions, called mRNA, to teach the body how to recognize and respond to a threat. Although these vaccines were made to combat against the COVID pandemic, the mRNA could be altered to treat other maladies, like cancer. 

The result was a new cancer treatment in the form of a readily available vaccination which has potential to sensitize the body’s defense system to a variety of otherwise hidden cancers.  

The off-the-shelf cancer vaccine is “so exciting because it can buy time – time being the most valuable resource to a cancer patient,” Sayour said. “And as you buy that time you can keep the cancer at bay and activate the immune response, and in so doing that enables anything you do afterwards to work much better.” 

This is brand-new research, so doctors and researchers are working together to learn how to do this safely.  There are significant risks inactivating the immune response too quickly or over activating it.

This vaccine faces multiple levels and layers of clinical trials before it can be considered a viable treatment method. There is one clinical trial that is currently happening in humans, and other trials are being planned. The UF College of Veterinary Medicine is using the mRNA vaccines to treat dogs that have cancers, with their owners’ consent. Some of these cancers, like osteosarcoma, are almost identical to human cancers, and treatments are beginning to show promising results.

Other experts in the field are watching the work with cautious optimism.  “I look at the vaccines as worth evaluating,” says Wade Iams, director of the lung cancer clinical trials program at a for-profit oncology practice, Tennessee Oncology, and former clinical trials leader at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who has overseen trials pertaining to cancer vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors. “I am a little more skeptical of cancer vaccines which are generalized to multiple cancers, just because of past experiences with these vaccines being failures.” 

Iams is involved in a phase III clinical trial in humans named ARTEMIA which is for another general off-the-shelf cancer vaccine, known as Tedopi. “Tedopi is showing promising results,” Iams said, “Using the vaccine after immune checkpoint inhibitors showed survival benefit compared to doing chemo immediately after immune checkpoint inhibitors.”

Findings presented in the Journal of Clinical Oncology from ATALANTE-1, a study prior to ARTEMIA, showed patients with lung cancer who had already tried other treatments lived about 11 months on average when given Tedopi, compared to seven and a half months for those who got regular chemotherapy. They also felt better and had fewer side effects. 

Tedopi’s success in human clinical trials, combined with Sayour’s early positive results, support the potential value of the off-the-shelf cancer vaccines that can work quickly and effectively. The hope is that Sayour’s vaccine, with its unique method of waking up the body’s defenses, could one day offer a new and powerful option for patients, especially those for whom time is of the utmost importance.