How Therapeutic Vaccines May Transform Lung Cancer Care

Dr. Thomas Marron recently sat down for an interview with CURE to discuss how therapeutic vaccines differ from preventative vaccines in lung cancer care.

Marron also discussed the topic of cancer vaccines that same day during an oral presentation at the CURE Educated Patient® Lung Cancer Summit, held in tandem with the 2025 PER® New York Lung Cancer Symposium.

Marron, a medical oncologist whose research focuses on the development of cancer immunotherapies, is the director of the Early Phase Trials Unit at The Tisch Cancer Institute, professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology), and professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Transcript

How do cancer vaccines differ from preventative vaccines?

Preventative vaccines are like the ones we get as children for measles, mumps, and rubella. These vaccines teach the immune system what to look for, so if you encounter measles later, your immune system is already primed to respond. Since you don’t have measles as a child, the vaccine trains your body to be protected for decades.

That’s the beauty of vaccines and the immune system in general: they are not only easy to educate, but they also have remarkable memory. Even a 90-year-old can still have immune cells that remember what to recognize from childhood.

A therapeutic vaccine, on the other hand, teaches the immune system to recognize something that poses an immediate threat. We already have a few examples, such as the rabies vaccine given after a bat bite. In that case, it is both preventative and therapeutic because the virus may already be present in the body. Cancer is similar: it is already in the body, and therapeutic vaccines are designed to teach the immune system in real time what to target and destroy.

Many of the most promising vaccines being developed today are intended for the adjuvant setting, which means after surgery. When a tumor (whether lung cancer or melanoma) is removed, microscopic bits may have already spread elsewhere in the body, such as the brain, liver, bones, or other parts of the lung. Adjuvant therapy targets these residual cells. Sometimes this involves chemotherapy or immunotherapy.

Vaccines are particularly exciting because they can train the immune system to seek out and destroy these microscopic cancer cells. Ideally, they provide long-term memory, protecting the patient from recurrence, much like measles vaccines protect for life.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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