UV1 Vaccine Plus Pembrolizumab Shows Strong Safety in Metastatic Melanoma

This is semi exciting; note that keytruda by itself is very effective in melanoma patients (not sure about the exact subtypes) a fraction of the time - it either works or it doesn’t, based on if there are enough antigens in your cancer that are different for the immune system to tack on to. There is no control arm. So it’s not clear what “therapeutic” effect uv1 is having.

In theory at least Uv1 (which primes the immune system against a cancer “antigen”) should pare well with keytruda which reduces T cell suppression by the cancer. This might increase the fraction of patients in which keytruda works.

But I like the approach, Always felt that targeting three or more immune pathways in a tumor agnostic way is our best bet to find a fairly universal cancer therapy. This would go against the regular cancer researcher spiel about why “each cancer is different”, when in reality I don’t think they are, not that much. Asking an existing cancer researcher about this is like asking Ford about it’s opinion on electric cars a few years back.