COVID mRNA vaccines may be able to train immune system to attack cancer cells, boost survival

COVID-19
Doctor pointing to patient's lung x-ray

dragana991 / iStock

COVID-19 mRNA vaccination significantly improves survival in patients with advanced lung or melanoma skin cancer who had started taking immunotherapy drugs within the past 100 days, suggests data presented yesterday at the 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Berlin.

Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center led the study, which was based on the clinical data of more than 1,000 patients with stage 3 or 4 non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) or melanoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) from 2019 to 2023.

The study included 180 lung-cancer patients who received a COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days before or after starting immunotherapy drugs and 704 given the same drugs who weren't vaccinated.

Of the melanoma patients, 43 received a vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy, and 167 patients didn't receive a vaccine. Among vaccine recipients, median survival rose from 26.7 months to a range of 30 to 40 months. 

Physicians often use ICIs to "train" the immune system of patients with lung and skin cancers to more effectively recognize and attack cancer cells. But patients with advanced disease usually don't respond well to this therapy.

"mRNA cancer vaccines sensitize tumors to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in part by stimulating a surge in inflammatory cytokines," the study authors wrote. "We hypothesized that mRNA vaccines targeting non-tumor antigens, such as those targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, would also sensitize tumors to ICIs."

Near doubling of survival in lung-cancer patients

Compared with vaccine non-receipt, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination within 100 days of starting an ICI was linked to a near-doubling of overall survival (OS) among NSCLC patients (median OS, 20.6 vs 37.3 months; 3-year OS, 30.6% vs 55.8%; adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 0.51) and those with metastatic melanoma (median, 26.67 vs unmet; 3-year OS, 44.1% vs 67.5%; aHR, 0.34). 

The really exciting part of our work is that it points to the possibility that widely available, low-cost vaccines have the potential to dramatically improve the effectiveness of certain immune therapies.

Adam Grippin, MD, PhD

At the time of data collection, some patients were still alive, indicating that the vaccine effects could be even stronger.

Survival benefits were maintained after propensity score matching and in patients with tumors that don't typically elicit a strong immune response. In preclinical models, the vaccines appeared to sensitize tumors to ICIs. 

"The really exciting part of our work is that it points to the possibility that widely available, low-cost vaccines have the potential to dramatically improve the effectiveness of certain immune therapies," presenting author Adam Grippin, MD, PhD, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in a center news release. 

"We are hopeful that mRNA vaccines could not only improve outcomes for patients being treated with immunotherapies but also bring the benefits of these therapies to patients with treatment-resistant disease," he added.

'The implications are extraordinary'

The results are preliminary, the authors cautioned, but if confirmed by a phase 3 randomized clinical trial now in the design stage, they could have broad clinical impact.

In a University of Florida news release, senior researcher Elias Sayour, MD, PhD, a university pediatric oncologist, said, "The implications are extraordinary—this could revolutionize the entire field of oncologic care. We could design an even better nonspecific vaccine to mobilize and reset the immune response, in a way that could essentially be a universal, off-the-shelf cancer vaccine for all cancer patients."

"If this can double what we're achieving [in survival] currently, or even incrementally—5%, 10% —that means a lot to those patients, especially if this can be leveraged across different cancers for different patients," he said.

Three study authors disclosed that they hold patents related to mRNA vaccines developed at the University of Florida and licensed by iOncologi, Inc.

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