Overview
- The five‑year follow‑up, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on Monday, showed intismeran plus pembrolizumab cut the risk of recurrence or death by about 49 percent versus pembrolizumab alone.
- After five years roughly 68.8 percent of patients who received the personalized vaccine and pembrolizumab were cancer‑free compared with 49.1 percent on pembrolizumab alone, and overall survival was higher at 92.2 percent versus 71.3 percent.
- The vaccine is made from each patient’s tumor sequence to encode 34 selected neoantigens that train T cells to spot remaining or emerging cancer cells, and the combo reduced the risk of distant metastasis by about 59 percent.
- Side effects were generally short‑lived and flu‑like, such as fatigue, chills and injection‑site pain, with no new long‑term safety signals reported in this phase 2b cohort of 157 patients.
- Wider clinical use depends on confirmation by a larger phase 3 trial of about 1,000 patients and on solving operational hurdles such as the weeks‑long, individualized manufacturing process, cost and distribution logistics.