RIGHT SPEAK: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Boosted Survival Almost 5-Fold In Some Cancer Patients; COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines May Boost Immunotherapy, Doubling Survival in Aggressive Cancers, and other C-Virus related stories

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COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Boosted Survival Almost 5-Fold In Some Cancer Patients:

Getting a COVID shot within 100 days of starting immunotherapy meant patients were twice as likely to be alive after three years.

Cancer patients receiving a certain type of immunotherapy were twice as likely to be alive after three years if they received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of beginning cancer treatment, new research presented at a recent conference has found.

It was when co-lead researcher Dr Adam Grippin was conducting graduate research at the University of Florida that the idea of using mRNA vaccines to boost the cancer-fighting abilities of the immune system was first mooted.

While developing a personalized mRNA vaccine for brain tumors under the supervision of Dr Elias Sayour, Grippin found that the mRNA vaccine candidates could prime the immune system to eliminate tumors even when the vaccines weren’t targeted specifically against the tumor cells.

The massive rollout of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 provided the perfect opportunity to investigate this potential link in the real world. Now a senior resident in Radiation Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Grippin partnered with Professor Steven Lin and led a team through a retrospective analysis of the outcomes of MD Anderson patients after receiving their COVID shots.

Looking at more than 1,000 patients treated between August 2019 and August 2023, the team found that of those receiving immune checkpoint therapy, they were twice as likely to be alive three years after starting cancer treatment if they had received a COVID vaccine within 100 days of their first treatment.

“This study demonstrates that commercially available mRNA COVID vaccines can train patients’ immune systems to eliminate cancer,” said Grippin in a statement. “When combined with immune checkpoint inhibitors, these vaccines produce powerful antitumor immune responses that are associated with massive improvements in survival for patients with cancer.”

Immune checkpoint inhibitors, hailed as “one of the most substantial advances in cancer therapy” of recent years, work differently than traditional chemotherapy. Instead of directly targeting and killing cancerous cells, they prime the immune system to better seek out and destroy tumors. --->READ MORE HERE

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COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines May Boost Immunotherapy, Doubling Survival in Aggressive Cancers:

Patients with advanced lung or skin cancer who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy lived significantly longer than those who did not, researchers report.

The observation—made by scientists at the University of Florida (UF) and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and presented at the 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology and published in Nature—marks a defining moment in more than a decade of work exploring how mRNA-based therapeutics can “wake up” the immune system to fight cancer. Building on years of preclinical findings, the study suggests that a readily available vaccine designed for infectious disease may also sensitize tumors to immunotherapy and dramatically extend survival.

“The implications are extraordinary—this could revolutionize the entire field of oncologic care,” said senior investigator Elias Sayour, MD, PhD, a UF Health pediatric oncologist and the Stop Children’s Cancer/Bonnie R. Freeman Professor for Pediatric Oncology Research. “We could design an even better nonspecific vaccine to mobilize and reset the immune response, in a way that could essentially be a universal, off-the-shelf cancer vaccine for all cancer patients.”

Resetting the tumor microenvironment

Although immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have transformed cancer treatment, most patients do not respond to these drugs. Poor responses are largely attributed to immunosuppressive tumor microenvironments (TMEs), which contain inhibitory immune cells. In some cancers, low intratumoral PD-L1 expression before therapy predicts poor response.

Until now, there have been no clinically available ways to modify the TME to improve ICI efficacy. Sayour’s lab and others have shown that systemic delivery of highly immunogenic mRNA nanoparticles can induce a powerful, virus-like cytokine and chemokine response that resets both the systemic and intratumoral immune environments, sensitizing resistant tumors to ICIs.

“For the last 12 years, we’ve been working on personalized mRNA cancer vaccines,” Sayour said. “Over this time, we made an absolutely fascinating discovery, which is even if the mRNA is completely nonspecific to a patient’s cancer, that mRNA could wake up the sleeping giant that is the immune system to fight cancer.”

The next leap came from Adam Grippin, MD, PhD, a former UF graduate student now at MD Anderson. “A brilliant graduate student who was working with us, Adam, asked a brilliant question,” Sayour recalled. “Which is, if nonspecific mRNA vaccines can rouse the immune system against cancer, what happens to patients receiving the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine? What happens to those patients who are also receiving conventional immunotherapies?” --->READ MORE HERE