When drugmakers Merck and Moderna announced promising results in August from a late-stage trial of adding an mRNA cancer vaccine to immunotherapy, it was heralded as potentially powerful new way of fighting tumors. But the data don’t show what such a treatment can mean for an individual patient.
At the STAT Summit in Boston on Thursday, a patient in the clinical trial for the treatment, intismeran autogene, told his story virtually. Gary Keblish, a schoolteacher, was diagnosed with melanoma and felt lucky to be in the trial for intismeran and to be in the treatment arm.