Ongoing clinical trials to develop a lung cancer vaccine to treat or prevent the most deadly form of cancer in the U.S. could be available to patients in “the next few years,” Dr. Stephen Liu, who works at Georgetown University’s cancer center.
“I’m optimistic that in the next few years, we’ll see one that’s ready for patients,” Liu told WTOP, amid ongoing concerns about funding cuts and research priorities of the new Trump administration.
“When we think of vaccines, what we’re trying to do is identify some target on a foreign cell, and direct our immune cells to destroy it,” said Liu, who’s the director of thoracic oncology and developmental therapeutics at Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The challenge? To avoid destroying healthy cells.
“Once upon a time, the lung cancer cells were our normal lung cells,” before they changed or mutated, said Liu.
According to the American Lung Association, “Most often, this is because of exposure to dangerous chemicals that we breathe. But lung cancer can also happen in people with no known exposure to toxic substances.”
Unlike normal cells, cancer cells grow uncontrollably and cluster together to form a tumor, destroying healthy lung tissue around them.
“See, if we develop a vaccine that targets a protein that’s also in our normal cells, there could be very high consequences with that,” said Liu, which would include killing normal cells. “So, we need something unique to the cancer.”
Promising lung cancer vaccines are in clinical trials
Liu said two potential lung cancer vaccines are especially encouraging and “are quite far along” in clinical trials.
One vaccine, BNT116, is being developed by BioNTech; “That name may sound familiar, since they partnered with Pfizer to develop the first COVID-19 vaccine,” Lester said.
The mRNA technology is “the infrastructure needed to build those antiviral vaccines that we use for cancer vaccines.”
Another vaccine that is further along in development is OSE2101, or Tedopi, “which is already showing promising results compared to chemotherapy,” Liu said.
Some of the research is in therapeutic vaccines, to treat people who have already been diagnosed with lung cancer: “To try to prevent cancers from coming back after surgery or radiation,” Liu said.
There are two main categories in therapeutic vaccines, Liu said.
“One is a tumor-informed vaccine, where we take a patient’s specific cancer, and look for specific proteins, and tailor that vaccine for that specific patient,” Liu said. “It’s very precise, and very exciting,” but also very labor-intensive and resource-heavy.
“We don’t know if that’s really going to be scalable, when we look at the magnitude of lung cancer,” Liu said. “A more practical approach is an off-the-shelf vaccine that works for everybody, that we could deliver like we would deliver COVID-19 or a flu vaccine.”
Will lung cancer vaccines make it to market?
With funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health, Liu was asked whether promising vaccines undergoing clinical trials will be derailed.
“It’s a good question, and we don’t really know exactly what the future holds, but I would say that trials that are further along, that are already underway, are not likely to stop,” Liu said. “The investment there is already paid, and those will probably be seen to fruition.”
However, Liu said lack of funding would affect future research and clinical trials.
“All the work that goes into discovering and developing new drugs, that happens years before the first trials,” Liu said. “So, if we’re stopping, we won’t feel that impact until later.”
With possible funding hurdles, “What really worries us is the impact on education of the best and the brightest,” Liu said. “Really, what the cancer research field had going for it was stability, where a lot of our students, researchers and academicians are accepting less money for that stability.”
If research stability is taken away, “My fear is that a lot of tomorrow’s cancer researchers are going to be directed to different fields, and that has the potential to really be a generational impact.”
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
