mRNA vax + pembro = skin cancer killer

Merck’s Keytruda — aka pembrolizumab — can help treat high-risk stage III/IV melanoma, sure, but when you add an mRNA vaccination from Moderna it becomes a lot more effective. In fact…

The findings, published Sunday, show that 44% of patients who received the combination therapy reduced the risk of recurrence compared to those who only received Keytruda.

That’s accurate, but it’s not the number to get excited about. Get this: “[N]early 79% of the 107 patients who received the mRNA vaccine in combination with Keytruda were cancer free after 18 months.”

Wow. Phase 3 trials will be starting soon, followed by trials on other types of cancer.

Get to the convention while you can

Another reason to come to Amelia Island for the Georgia Pharmacy Convention: It might not be there in a few years. The island, that is:

Study finds record-breaking rates of sea-level rise along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts since 2010

So head over to GPhAConvention.com for the details and to register today!

Bacteria train the body to attack melanoma

Stanford scientists have found a nifty way to attack skin cancer: genetically engineered bacteria. Specifically, it’s Staphylococcus epidermidis which (as you can tell by the epidermidis part) naturally lives on the skin.

They souped-up the bacteria so it could produce an antigen — a copy of a protein unique to the problem tumor. Like mustering an army, the bacteria was able to “trick the mouse’s immune system into producing CD8 T cells targeting the chosen antigen.”

These cells traveled throughout the mice and rapidly proliferated when they encountered a matching tumor, drastically slowing tumor growth or extinguishing the tumors altogether.

In fact, the result even shocked the researchers: “The resulting immune response was strong enough to kill even an aggressive type of metastatic skin cancer, without causing inflammation.”

Said one: “I honestly hadn’t expected it to work. Every other type of tumor vaccine research involves radiation, chemotherapy or surgery, but we barely did anything to these mice. The T cells did the work for us.”

Ancestor’s virus, today’s cancer-fighter

Why do some people respond better to immunotherapy for lung cancer? The answer could be millions of years old.

Some people produce white blood cells (B cells, specifically) that attack the tumors, but not everyone. What’s the difference? Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute found the surprise answer: In some cases, the cancer was ‘waking up’ dormant genes — viral DNA that was thousands or millions of years old. And those genes attracted the B cells.

[T]he antibodies recognised proteins expressed by ancient viral DNA, known as endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), which form about 5% of the human genome and are passed down from the historic infections of our ancestors.

In the majority of healthy tissue these viral genes are silenced, but in cancers they can be woken up.

This means they may have found a way, either by using or mimicking that old DNA, to turn up the response of the body’s B cells and get them to attack tumors.

Shape-shifting antibiotic

What do you do when vancomycin can’t kill bacteria? How about giving the drug the ability to shape-shift — to change its atomic structure so that if one version doesn’t work, another might? And as a bonus, bacteria would have a tough time developing resistance; it’d be like trying to defend against Jackie Chan while he’s got a Swiss Army Knife^*.

The trick (found scientists at Cold Spring National Laboratory) is to combine vancomycin with a molecule called bullvalene. Bullvalene has an interesting property: Its atoms can swap positions, Rubik’s Cube-style. Using a technique called click chemistry, scientists at Cold Spring National Laboratory clicked the vancomycin with the bullvalene to create a “shape-shifting antibiotic significantly more effective than vancomycin.”

And it worked. On moth larvae, anyway, where it cleared an infection without the bacteria becoming resistant. Next up … you guessed it. More research.

^* Not the best analogy, we admit, but you get the idea.

Coming soon: QR codes for everything

UPC bar codes are out, and “2D barcodes” are in — well, they will be over the next few years, with a full phase out by 2027. (That sounds a long way away, doesn’t it? But it’s not even four years.)

The difference? QR codes will be able to link to a lot more information for both businesses and consumers — distributor tracing, manufacturing data, dosage information, side effects … you get the idea.

Will you need to update your barcode scanners? Why yes, you probably will.

Side note: Want to create your own QR codes that link to your website, Facebook page, YouTube channel or more — or that simply contain your contact info? Here at Buzz HQ we use the free QRCode Monkey. No, we weren’t paid to say that.

Captain Obvious thinks Norway may be on to something

“Poverty could be a major risk factor for death in the U.S.”

Short Take

New opioid label requirements

The FDA has updates its label requirements for opioids, requiring packages to have warnings about overdose risk and opioid-induced hyperalgesia, as well as mandating changes to the boxed warning and the “Indications and Usage section.”

You can see a handy-dandy chart here (PDF).