Cancer vaccines utilizing mRNA vaccine technology have such potential that ARPA-H, a newly established White House-originated program, has made it the focus of its first ever grant, announced August 23, 2023. The total grant is $25 million over three years, to be split among teams at Emory University, Yale School of Medicine, and the Georgia Tech teams at the three institutions are working together to strive to harness the natural immune system for development of personalized therapeutic vaccines against cancer and emerging infections, along the lines of how the mRNA vaccine targets SARS-CoV-2.
The multi-institutional team will be studying how to advance technology from the burgeoning mRNA vaccine field to program dendritic cells to produce therapeutic immune reactions, with personalized cancer vaccines as the ultimate goal.
The teams are working together to use mRNA—the essential element of vaccines that were developed to prevent COVID-19 infection—to program the dendritic cells to process antigenic proteins, thereby triggering selective immunological responses. “The mRNA teaches these dendritic cells how to ignite the desired systemic immune reaction,” says Edelson, former chair of Yale Dermatology and a past director of Yale Cancer Center. “Without understating the challenges ahead, the possibilities are immense.”
It is interesting the team will focus on dendritic cells. Dendritic cells that take pieces of protein from antigens from cancer cells and deliver it to our immune system, and our immune system produce bunch of T-cells which will attack the cancer cell. Moderna and BioNTeck solutions so far are clinical application on what our body immune system already naturally responds to neoantigens which our body produces from mRNAs which those companies synthesized.
Dr. Philip Santangelo of Georgia Tech and Emory Univ. leads the project. His main research has been RNA and mRNA. He seems to be able to use mRNA as tinker toy to do various tasks.
bme.gatech.edu/bme/news/researchers-successfully-use-mrna-activate-genes
Dr. Richard Edelson (MD) of Yale, professor of Dermatology, who was director of immunology at Columbia Univ leads the Yale group, who received $6.5M. Dr. Edelson says “Our work will hopefully forge closer collaboration between physicians and the natural immune system itself,” says Edelson. While Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology for his discovery of dendritic cells, efforts to translate that breakthrough into treatments for cancer and serious infections have been stymied by two key scientific roadblocks: need to understand how the body naturally produces dendritic cells that function well in patients, and learning how to efficiently program these pivotal cells to produce desirable therapeutic responses. Now that those two roadblocks have been scientifically overcome, exciting opportunities to develop potent dendritic cell vaccines may be on the near-term horizon. "
In his lab, his team has been striving to figure out how to turn the immune system back on so that it will reject the cancer just as it would a transplanted organ. “It’s potentially the ultimate cancer therapy,” he says.
medicine.yale.edu/profile/redelson/ 
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