During the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting 2026, data were presented for a number of cancer vaccines, including in melanoma, glioblastoma and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.
Cancer vaccines are working their way through clinical trials; however, there may be some difficulties due to growing scepticism around their safety among high-ranking US health agency employees – including the US Health Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK Jr).
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
In August 2025, RFK Jr took steps to deprioritise mRNA vaccine research by revoking $500m in funding awarded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). This move impacted 22 mRNA vaccine development programmes.
In conversation with Clinical Trials Arena’s sister publication, Pharmaceutical Technology, experts warned that these shifts could mark the politicisation of decisions around mRNA jabs, despite the technology becoming a “breakthrough” in the world of vaccinations.
Melanoma vaccine reduces risk of death by nearly half
Moderna and MSD’s cancer vaccine, intismeran, cut the risk of skin cancer recurrence and death by 49% in a Phase IIb trial. This reduction was calculated five years after patients had their tumours surgically removed and remains unchanged.
After five years of follow-up, 68.8% of patients who took the combination therapy remained cancer-free, while 49.1% of the patients in the pembrolizumab-alone group had no signs of cancer.
The combination therapy also reduced the risk of distant metastasis – the spread of cancer to another part of the body – by 59%. Overall survival (OS) was 92.2% for the vaccine with immunotherapy group, while for the immunotherapy-alone group it was 71.3%.
The companies presented the data from the KEYNOTE-942 study at ASCO 2026, where intismeran was combined with MSD’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab). The study enrolled 107 patients following melanoma surgery to determine whether the combination therapy prevented their cancer from recurring.
Intismeran is a personalised immunotherapy strategy that is developed with information from a patient’s individual tumour.
Dr Janice Mehnert, who also serves as director of the melanoma medical oncology program and associate director of clinical research at Perlmutter Cancer Center, said: “Our findings serve as encouragement to cancer researchers globally that mRNA vaccines like intismeran could work well in combination with immunotherapy for other cancers whose high rates of mutations have proven difficult to target.”
Brain cancer vaccine increases survival by nearly one year
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s personalised neoantigen vaccine, NeoVax, increased survival by 11.6 months in a Phase I trial (NCT02287428) in patients with brain cancer.
In the study, NeoVax, which was combined with pembrolizumab (Keytruda), yielded a median overall survival (OS) of 36.9 months in patients with newly diagnosed MGMT-methylated glioblastoma, compared with 25.3 months in propensity-matched institutional standard-of-care (SoC) controls.
In patients with MGMT-unmethylated disease, the median OS was 19 months compared to 16.7 months in matched controls, which has been described as a counterintuitive finding.
Patients in cohort 1B, who initiated Keytruda after vaccine priming, had inferior OS compared with those in cohorts 2 and 3, where Keytruda was introduced prior to vaccination.
“Contrary to what we predicted, we saw the opposite, where patients who received PD-1 blockade after vaccine priming, cohort 1B, had an inferior outcome compared to patients who received PD-1 blockade prior to vaccine initiation,” said Dr David Reardon, Clinical Director of the Center for Neuro-Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
The study enrolled patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma who had undergone gross total resection, had a Karnofsky Performance Status of 70 or greater, adequate organ function, and were not on dexamethasone.
Tumour tissue obtained at surgery underwent DNA and RNA sequencing and HLA typing to identify coding mutations predicted to yield immunogenic neoepitopes for a given patient’s HLA alleles.
J&J reports CR of more than a third
Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J’s) Rybrevant Faspro (amivantamab) led to an overall response rate (ORR) of 42%, with more than one-third of responders achieving complete responses.
In the Phase Ib/II OrigAMI-4 study, patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma received subcutaneous Rybrevant Faspro.
The study also reported a 27% partial response rate, a clinical benefit rate of 63% and the median time to first response was 6.6 weeks (range, 5.6-36.9).
Median progression-free survival (PFS) and OS were 6.8 months and 12.5 months, respectively. Median duration of response was not yet reached, with a median follow up of 11.8 months.
Dr Barbara Burtness, medical oncologist and professor of medicine at Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut, said: “Patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer who have already been treated with immunotherapy and chemotherapy face very poor outcomes. The high response seen with subcutaneous Rybrevant on its own, including more than one-third of responders achieving complete responses, and the durability of those responses, suggests it has the potential to meaningfully improve expectations for these patients.”
A supplemental Biologics License Application (sBLA) seeking approval for subcutaneous Rybrevant Faspro in head and neck cancer has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), following Breakthrough Therapy Designation.
