Personalised cancer vaccines at commodity cost through fully automated manufacturing
Vaccines tailored to each patient's tumour mutations are showing real benefit but cost a fortune to make. Automate the whole process so a personalised vaccine costs about as much as a course of chemotherapy.
Individualised neoantigen mRNA vaccines have shown reduced recurrence in melanoma with pembrolizumab (phase 2b, with phase 3 ongoing) and immune responses in pancreatic cancer, but require bespoke sequencing, epitope selection and GMP manufacture per patient at very high cost. The proposal is an engineering programme for end-to-end automation: standardised sample-to-sequence pipelines, validated epitope prediction, continuous-flow mRNA synthesis and formulation in closed robotic units sited regionally, and regulatory acceptance of platform-based release testing, targeting a manufactured cost under a few thousand dollars and turnaround under three weeks.
- Prices and value · New cancer drugs routinely cost over $150,000 a year, often for months of benefit. Systems cannot afford them and patients go bankrupt.
- No one can predict who responds to immunotherapy · Checkpoint drugs cure some patients and do nothing for most. We still cannot tell the two apart before treating.
- Dormant cells and minimal residual disease · After a 'successful' treatment, cells can sleep for years then relapse. We can barely detect them and cannot target them.