Comment by tansey

For all the folks complaining about "it's only in mice! things never work in humans!" -- I work at MSK and we definitely have seen success treating PDAC in humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06063-y

"Why don't I see these treatments hitting the general public?" Because trials like these are phase I/II. Then you need a phase III that takes a long time to recruit a large cohort and has overall survival as an end point so you need a long time to measure the actual outcome you care about. And most trials fail in phase III because the surrogate end points used in phase II studies, like progression free survival (ie how long did patients go before their disease advanced in screens), are not necessarily great predictors of improved overall survival.

Specifically for cancer vaccines, this paper was a driving force behind MSK establishing a cancer vaccine center to scale up these personalized neoantigen mRNA vaccines. It's very very difficult to do and extremely expensive right now.