Meningococcal Vaccine: Protection, Risk, Schedule
Top 5 Cancer Vaccine Stories From 2024
With breakthroughs from melanoma to pancreatic cancer, this has been a year of great promise in the field of cancer vaccines.
Here are the top 5 cancer vaccine stories CURE® has covered during 2024.
This has been a year of tremendous promise for cancer vaccine research. With breakthroughs spanning a wide range of cancers, from pancreatic cancer to melanoma, vaccines are moving ever closer to becoming a key component of cancer treatment.
Throughout the year, CURE® has extensively covered the topic of cancer vaccines, from breaking news to in-depth reporting. Here are some highlights of our cancer vaccine coverage from 2024.
GlossaryRelapse-free survival: the time after treatment that a patient lives without signs or symptoms of cancer.
Personalized cancer vaccines could be available for some patient populations as soon as next year, one expert said in an interview with CURE®.
"We are way closer than we ever thought [we would be] just like three years ago," said Dr. Patrick Ott, director of the Center for Personal Vaccines, clinical director of the Melanoma Disease Center and director of clinical sciences of the Center for Immuno-Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, as well as an attending physician in the department of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a member of the scientific advisory board of drug development company Imunon.
The enthusiasm followed the phase 2b KEYNOTE-942/mRNA-4157-P201 study, which found that patients with advanced-stage melanoma experienced reduced risk of recurrence or death following treatment with a combination of mRNA vaccine mRNA-4157 (V940) and Keytruda (pembrolizumab).
The combination reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% and the risk of distant metastasis or death by 62% when compared with treatment with Keytruda alone in patients with stage 3 or 4 melanoma with a high risk of recurrence following complete resection.
ELI-002 7P is an off-the-shelf vaccine being developed to treat resected pancreatic cancer and offers a "new twist on an older vaccine technology," Dr. Suresh Nair told CURE®.
Nair is the physician-in-chief at the Lehigh Valley Topper Cancer Institute in Pennsylvania.
"I've been a medical oncologist in the community setting for 35 years with a strong focus on immunotherapy treatment and research and I feel as excited about this trial as I did [when] we were part of the first phase 2 testing of [Opdivo (nivolumab)] in melanoma back in 2013," Nair said.
"Current vaccines have a dismal record, and minimal evidence of efficacy," said Dr. Jeffrey S. Weber, who was the deputy director of the NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center and Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Oncology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, via email in a January 2024 interview.
Weber, who died in August, was among the researchers on the KEYNOTE-942 study.
"This mRNA vaccine would be the first approved cancer vaccine with clear-cut evidence of efficacy in a well-done phase 3 trial [which was recently initiated]," Weber said of mRNA-4157.
While ELI-002, a vaccine for the postsurgical treatment of KRAS-mutated pancreatic and colorectal cancers, is showing promising early study results, any potential broad commercial availability of the drug is likely far off, as one researcher told CURE®.
"We're certainly trying to advance as quickly as possible, but it'll be several years most likely before this drug is broadly available," said Dr. Christopher Haqq, chief medical officer and vice president, head of research and development for biotechnology company Elicio Therapeutics, Inc., in an interview with CURE®.
Haqq was among the investigators of a phase 1 clinical trial studying ELI-002, the results of which were published in Nature Medicine showing that mKRAS-specific T cell responses and tumor biomarker responses were observed in 84% of patients, while biomarker clearance was observed in 24% of patients, and the median relapse-free survival was 16.33 months, with no dose-limiting toxicities observed.
For the summer seasonal issue of CURE®, we put a spotlight on advancements in cancer vaccines, speaking with both patients who have been treated with vaccines and researchers working in the field.
Among those patients was teacher Gary Keblish, who has lived without recurrence of melanoma for four years since receiving six post-surgical doses of the vaccine-Keytruda combination as part of the KEYNOTE-942 clinical trial.
"I think it's a marvel," Keblish says of the treatment. "And I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity [to participate in a clinical trial] to do it. As a layperson, in terms of making the decision to do it, my choices were to do nothing further about the cancer that was removed from my body, or to enter a regular treatment plan, a known, established treatment plan, or put my name in the hat, and hope that I can be included in a clinical trial. And it was wonderful to have that choice."
For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don't forget to subscribe to CURE®'s newsletters here.
The Lifesaving Legacy Of Vaccines
Jeremy Faust is editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and a public health researcher. He is author of the Substack column Inside Medicine. Follow
In part 2 of this exclusive video interview, MedPage Today's editor-in-chief Jeremy Faust, MD, talks with Perri Klass, MD, of NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City, about the evolution of vaccine policies, the challenges of teaching modern medicine, and how collective action has made the world safer for children.
You can watch part 1 of this interview here.
The following is a transcript of their remarks:
Faust: In addition to being a luminous writer, you are also a pediatrician. And I want to talk about in your career the way the conversation has changed around things like vaccination, because you've seen a few different eras, I would say, even in just a couple of decades or a few decades at this.
Klass: I grew up with the idea that, as I say, my parents remembered polio. My grandparents were probably -- if you had said, 'Hey, we have a new vaccine,' they would probably have lined up before you told them what the vaccine was. They still had that very clear memory of what it was like to be as scared as they had been. So I grew up with the idea that this [vaccination] had made a tremendous difference.
We lived in India when I was a child, and I also grew up with the idea that there were parts of the world where vaccines were less available, and that was a huge injustice and children died.
In my own time practicing as a pediatrician, well, you mentioned the polio vaccine. I was in practice when we were still giving the oral polio vaccine. And when the decision was made that actually polio had become so rare in the United States at least, that we would stop giving oral polio vaccine, which is a live virus vaccine, and which causes a very few cases of vaccine-related infection because of the live virus. And we always had to ask if there was someone in the house who was immune compromised, we always had to worry about that, that we would change instead to giving the killed polio vaccine, which has no live virus in it, and which cannot cause vaccine-related infections.
So I remember that, and that in many ways felt like a victory. The number of cases is now so low that we can worry about those very few cases. I've also been in practice during the era when a lot of the vaccines that were not in that New York Times article that ran today were mentioned, the vaccines that parents started vaccinating against some diseases which probably hadn't been keeping parents awake night after night, like Haemophilus influenza type B or pneumococcal disease or meningococcal disease. The families which were devastated by children who got those fierce, horrible, deadly, devastating bacterial infections.
They knew them, but they were comparatively rare. So I would say that I would date not only my own practice, but also my own parenthood to this question of, Hey, you know what? We don't have to worry about Haemophilus influenza type B anymore. And now I've become one of those kind of antiquated attendings who's saying to the residents 'Oh, you don't remember the way that when I was training, they used to talk to us about polio. You residents don't remember how scary it was. You don't remember the iron lungs, everything you started with.' Well, now I'm one of those people saying 'Oh, you don't remember Haemophilus influenza type B, epiglottitis, periorbital cellulitis, devastating, horrible infections that you will never see because now everyone's immunized.'
Faust: It sometimes feels like we are in 1930 because we're teaching the students to look for hepatosplenomegaly, which of course we don't need to diagnose. That's a stage IV cancer. We ask them to look for all these clinical signs and symptoms that we will pick up from our rapid antigen test or from the swab or from the x-ray. How do you teach medicine today in 2024 with trying to meld those two eras?
Klass: It's hard. I agree it's hard. On the one hand, I think anything, and I'm speaking as a pediatrician here, but maybe also as a non-pediatric patient. I think people still want to feel in the medical encounter that someone is looking at you carefully, touching you, thinking about you. So I think that anything that we can teach, which encouraged you in pediatrics, really look at the child, look at what the child can do, interact with the child, touch the child, put your hands on, matters. And I find, I don't know if you do, I find I want that as a patient too.
Faust: The greater point that I think is so accurate is that they want a doctor, they don't want a transcriber of medical information into the chart.
Klass: And I think also in pediatrics where a lot of what we do is still well visits, even I, as a pediatrician, I guess I found it reassuring when my children were babies to have the doctor listen and say to me 'Fine strong heart, fine clear lungs.' It's just, it's nice because one of the things that you might ask me and that I've wondered about a million times, and you've probably got an opinion about this is, so everything changed. All the mortality statistics so dramatically. I'm not sure parents got less anxious. I'm not sure that parenthood, I mean by all rights, we should be much, much less anxious than our grandparents. But I'm not sure that we are.
Faust: Well, I think that our social networks are bigger, and so we have more loose ties. So back then you might know a hundred people closely. Today there's a thousand people you follow around because of your social ties. And so that's a ten-fold bigger catchment for your own anecdotals. So it's interesting.
Klass: Interesting.
Faust: Yeah. So I think that maybe our immediate surroundings might be safer, but we still sense that there's a menacing threat out there. I think that drives a lot of concern.
And I think that that's actually maybe we will kind of tie this up and end here, is to say that when we talk to our patients about risk, we are very frequently, very subtly overplaying the individual risk. Because if everyone is vaccinated, your kid's protected. They're getting the benefit of that herd protection. And so in fact, we say, well, if your kid doesn't get vaccinated, they might get measles. But the reality is that's a conversation that we're having with a 1,000 people. And if enough of those people don't get vaccinated, then a bunch of their kids are going to get measles. And so it's a strange conversation to have because the individual risk only becomes great if that conversation goes sideways enough of the time.
Klass: Yes, that is so right. I mean, I said to you, I think this might be the greatest thing we ever did as a species. The best showcase for the ways in which smart -- and I still believe that vaccines and immunization are one of the smartest things we did. And I speak to you as somebody who, as a medical student and as a resident, could never learn immunology.
But here's this unbelievably complicated system that I can barely understand that I can never keep in my mind. And we learned how to trick it. We learned how to turn it on without you actually having to have the terrible disease, without you having to have the smallpox or the diphtheria or the polio. We've learned how to turn on your defenses and take advantage of that incredibly intricate mechanism, much too hard for us to have ever designed.
But then the question is, what else do you learn from this? And I think the other huge lesson is the one that you just referenced. You don't make the world safer for children, one child at a time. The reason the world is so much safer for children is because you've started applying things as public health interventions. You've started getting it out to all children. You took smallpox out of the equation by vaccinating everybody. You can stop using the oral polio vaccine because you vaccinated everybody. You make the world safer for children.
And I think this also honestly applies, if you think about accident prevention, you don't make your house childproof. You say you have to put childproof caps on all the medicines, and the world becomes safer. You don't say 'Hey, build this in your car and your child will be safer. You say, here's what we know keeps a baby safe in a car. Everybody has to do it.'
Faust: As I hear you say this, I think to myself that we need to reset the messaging. It's not that science is under attack, it's that the safety of our kids is under attack. And that is a message that the parents of the kids that we treat and the kids of the parents that we treat can really resonate with. And Perri Klass, I wish your book A Good Time to be Born weren't so relevant right now, but I do hope that even if we're able to fight back against the tide that we're seeing, that people will read it just so we can reflect on the accomplishments that are captured in that book.
Klass: Thank you so much.
Faust: Thanks for joining us.
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The Names Behind NYU's Buildings
From billionaire donors to notorious nightclubs, NYU's property honors decades of city and school history.
With a lengthy list of wealthy alumni and real estate in the city's most historic districts, NYU has no shortage of subjects for its building's namesakes. But despite their extensive history — or massive donations — the people and stories honored by the university's property often go overlooked by its campus community.
Paulson CenterStern alum John Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager, donated $100 million to NYU for the building's construction ahead of its opening in January 2023.
The former university trustee has held close ties to President-elect Donald Trump since his first term in office. Paulson was deemed a top contender to serve as treasury secretary for the upcoming Trump administration, however, he removed himself as a nominee for the position days after the presidential election. Paulson said that he planned to "remain actively involved with the President's economic team," despite having "complex financial obligations" that barred him from filling the position.
During Trump's first presidential term, Paulson served as a member of his economic policy team under Stephen Miller, the former senior advisor to the president and current nominee for deputy chief of staff for policy. In April, Paulson also raised over $50.5 million for Trump's presidential campaign at a fundraising dinner hosted at his Palm Beach mansion.
Paulson rose to Wall Street fame after he made $4 billion betting against mortgage-backed securities through his hedge fund, Paulson and Co., just ahead of the 2007 housing market collapse. Harvard University also renamed its school of engineering after Paulson donated $400 million to the university in 2015.
Located at the corner of Mercer Street and Bleeker Street, the Paulson Center cost NYU $1.2 billion in total to construct over seven years. In its original architectural plans, it was set to be named the "Zipper Building" for its towers' staggering pattern.
Bobst LibraryThe Elmer Holmes Bobst Library is named after the pharmaceutical businessman and philanthropist who donated $11.5 million to the university in 1972.
Bobst was a close friend and adviser to former President Richard Nixon, guiding his approach and policy related to U.S. Health issues, and served as the chairman of the New Jersey Republican Finance Committee. He also sponsored research on drug products, pursued philanthropy in cancer and education organizations, and sat on various pharmaceutical and chemical committees during World War II.
Bobst's history of antisemitic comments, as well as sexual assault allegations from his granddaughter and great-granddaughter, have incited calls for the NYU to rename the library. Though the efforts have arisen sporadically over the years — including a 2017-2018 student government resolution, petitions and op-eds — none have yielded a successful name change.
Jasper Kane CafeJasper Kane Cafe, a dining hall at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering campus in Brooklyn, honors a biochemist who spearheaded the mass production of penicillin, saving thousands of soldiers during World War II.
Kane graduated from Polytechnic University — which merged with Tandon in 2014 — in 1928 and worked at Pfizer, which primarily produced citric acid for the food and drink industry at the time. Responding to appeals from the U.S. And British governments amid the war, the company aimed to discover how to produce penicillin in bulk to treat wounded Allied soldiers. Kane worked alongside Polytechnic alum John McKeen to experiment with the deep-tank fermentation process, despite pushback from Pfizer management, to successfully mass produce the antibiotic.
The breakthrough made Pfizer the world's largest producer of penicillin during World War II and helped it become an international pharmaceutical company, now best known for developing the first vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Palladium residence hallPrior to NYU's purchase of the building as a residence hall, Palladium was a concert venue, recording studio and one of the city's most prominent nightclubs.
Originally known as The Academy of Music, the spot served as a cinema for nearly 50 years before its acclamation among rock artists transformed it into a concert venue in the early 1970s. By 1976, it was officially dubbed the Palladium and established as one of the city's most popular spots for live recordings.
In 1985, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager reinvented the space as a vibrant nightclub known for house music and a modernized take on New York's other downtown discotheques. Cultivating a historic comeback after briefly serving time in prison for tax evasion, the two were already known for their founding of Studio 54 — often regarded as the most infamous hub for nightlife in New York's history.
Rubell and Schrager decorated the vicinity with bright, geometric art and flashy lighting schemes. It was notorious for some of the most technologically progressive visuals of its era, including a backdrop that rose to accommodate the dance floor's crowd and screens projecting mosaics that warped the area's shape. Featuring art from Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente and other major artists, it became a marquee venue for the city's socialites and regularly saw celebrities such as Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol and Grace Jones.
In 1997, NYU bought the building for $80 million. The university opened it as a residence hall the next year, having demolished and rebuilt everything but its namesake.
Contact Sydney Chan at [email protected].
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