How Vaccines Can Partner With Immunotherapy to Treat Lung Cancer

Immunotherapies have represented a revolution in the landscape of cancer treatment — and they may have a crucial partner in the form of personalized cancer vaccines, as an expert recently explained.

Dr. Thomas Marron discussed the topic of cancer vaccines recently 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.

Immunotherapies, such as the blockbuster immune checkpoint inhibitor drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab), work by keeping cancer cells from suppressing a patient’s immune system and thus allowing the immune system to attack cancer cells, as explained by the National Cancer Institute on its website.

“We can't really use these therapies,” Marron said during his presentation at the summit, “unless we have good ways of teaching your immune system [how to recognize cancer cells]. So how do we teach the T cells what to recognize? We use cancer vaccines. We basically are training that T cell how to recognize and see the tumor cell.”

In cancer, Marron explained, “you have all these mutations, and the mutations result in these foreign proteins, and it's the foreignness that makes a tumor cell recognizable. So you don't want your immune system recognizing the normal lung cells, because that would kill you. You want it recognizing just the tumor. What is it that's foreign about that tumor? And we can focus in on what's foreign about that tumor, and we can make a vaccine that just targets those foreign things.”

Currently, researchers are developing a variety of what are known as personalized cancer vaccines, created through a process that Marron detailed.

“What we do is we take the tumor, so we'll take a biopsy of the tumor, or sometimes, if this is a patient who went to the operating room and [surgeons] cut out the tumor but we know that that patient has a high chance of the cancer coming back — not because the surgeon didn't do a good job cutting out the tumor, they usually cut the tumor out with a big margin around it, it's because microscopic bits of that cancer are remaining on your liver or your lungs or your brain, and that's what results in recurrence and metastasis.

“So basically, our surgeons go in, they cut [the tumor] out. We know that there's little extra bits. That's where we might give you additional immunotherapy or chemotherapy. We can also think about giving you vaccines. And so, if we can take that tumor and we can do genetic sequencing, and we can find out what is it in that tumor that's different from your normal cells. So, we take some blood, and those are your normal cells, and we take the tumor and we look at the entire DNA sequence. It's like looking at two cookbooks that should be identical, but one uses margarine and one uses butter. And you say, ‘Oh, that's the difference. You should tell a vaccine to target the cell using margarine, because butter tastes so much better than margarine.’ So you basically identify what is it that's different, and you use that information to make a vaccine, because those are things that are foreign, and your immune system should recognize and attack those things.”

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