Last week a Nature paper published by Grippin et al (🔗👇🏼) made the news as the authors suggested that cancer patients who received the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting checkpoint inhibitors, survived longer than those who didn’t receive the vaccine. @doctor-yas breaks down how the study was done and what the researchers found. This exciting finding unveils another way that mRNA technology is more powerful than we ever dreamed. To learn more visit ImmunologyExplained.org or read the paper below.
PMID: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09655-y
Plot twist. The mRNA COVID 19 vaccine may have boosted imunotherapy in cancer patients. These patients with lung cancer who received the vaccine within 100 days of starting checkpoint inhibitors live nearly twice as long as those patients who didn’t receive the vaccine. Melanoma patients, the differences were just as striking. Or when looking at a broader mixed cohort of different cancer types, risk of death was reduced by 27%. Yes, the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines seem to have boosted imunotherapy against cancer. But how? Your body has trillions of mRNA coding for everything. But if foreign RNA enters your body, your body has sensors set up to catch invading viruses sounding the alarm. But it seems that the CO 19 mRNA triggers a powerful burst from the innate immune system release type one interferons which creates a very inflammatory environment which is very desirable when you have cancer cells that are hiding from the immune system. Checkpoint inhibitors can’t do their job. The immune system can’t get to the tumors. This very inflammatory environment makes cold tumors hot. T- cells amplified, activated, and infiltrated the cancer cells. And when the cancer cells try to fight back with something called PDL1, the checkpoint inhibitors literally shut this down. Primed immune system is able to fight the tumors. This identified this in mice, but they then recaptured these inflammatory pathways in healthy volunteers who received the mRNA COVID vaccine and had blood samples collected various time points. Seems like the mRNA co 19 vaccines primed the innate immune system that helped to make the tumors sensitive to immune checkpoint inhibitors.
