The research group of Professor Nam Jae-hwan from the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the Catholic University has announced that they have succeeded in developing a treatment for cervical cancer derived from HPV (Human Papillomarvirus) using the mRNA platform they developed.
Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women and causes 310,000 deaths worldwide every year.
The incidence rate is particularly high in low- and middle-income countries, and because it is a sexually transmitted virus, it is often difficult to treat with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, so the development of new treatments has been necessary .
Recently, research on developing vaccines to treat cancer using mRNA has become a hot topic in academia. Professor Nam Jae-hwan’s research group modified the E6 and E7 genes of HPV types 16 and 18 so that they do not cause cancer and then applied them to the mRNA platform.
Left: How the therapeutic mRNA HPV vaccine works. Right: Following transplantation of cervical cancer cells into experimental mice and inoculation with a therapeutic HPV mRNA vaccine developed by domestic technology, the size of the growing cancer in the experimental mice was reduced or completely disappeared, as measured by changes in cancer volume and PET tomography. Confirmation/Catholic University
Subsequently, the developed mRNA vaccine was administered to experimental mice that had already been transplanted with cervical cancer cells, and as a result, most of the cancer growth was suppressed or completely disappeared.
Even when the cervical cancer was transplanted again 62 days after vaccination, the cancer did not grow at all, confirming that the mRNA-induced immune response was maintained for a long time.
Furthermore, excellent immune responses were observed in primate experiments on macaques, and the research team expects that the product can also be fully used in humans.
Professor Nam Jae-hwan said: “As a result of establishing the foundation for domestically produced mRNA vaccines through the development of our expression technologies and delivery systems for mRNA vaccine development starting in 2022, we have been capable of developing Korea’s first native mRNA cancer vaccine treatment’.” “We plan to conduct clinical trials with the newly developed mRNA therapeutic vaccine and review the development modalities for the treatment of various cancers,” he said .
The results of this study were published in the international journal ‘Jornal of Medical Virology (IF=12.7)’.
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