AstraZeneca might develop cancer vaccines, CEO tells analysts at oncology conference

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Soriot said AstraZeneca's research team has done a lot of work on mRNA technology and that more details will come

Bloomberg / Getty Images

AstraZeneca $AZN is weighing a move into cancer vaccine work, CEO Pascal Soriot said in remarks to analysts at the European Society for Medical Oncology conference in Madrid, according to Bloomberg.

Cancer vaccines have come up in many internal discussions, Soriot said, according to Bloomberg. "Our R&D team has done a lot of work in the last couple of years on mRNA technology. We believe we can actually do something in the field, and you'll hear more about this in the months and years to come," he said.

The comments are the clearest sign yet that the U.K. drugmaker has an appetite for this field, according to Bloomberg. AstraZeneca partnered with Oxford University on a Covid-19 vaccine, yet it has mostly concentrated on cancer, cardiometabolic and rare-disease drugs, according to Bloomberg.

Dave Fredrickson, executive vice president of AstraZeneca's oncology business unit, said during a Saturday interview that the company must pursue areas where it can lead, according to Bloomberg. "We have to play in the spaces where we can win, and winning is about being best in class, being first, leveraging scale," he said.

Fredrickson said other companies are better positioned to advance personalized cancer vaccines, according to Bloomberg. He added that the company's infectious disease unit has an interest in non-personalized vaccines.

Personalized cancer vaccines are built around an individual patient's tumor, whereas non-personalized versions would be aimed at larger groups of people whose cancers are alike, according to Bloomberg. Proof for the non-personalized approach is more limited at this point, according to Bloomberg.

Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca's executive vice president of oncology hematology R&D, said she would like additional evidence on how well personalized vaccines hold up across more types of cancer. Data presented at the conference showed the vaccines are effective in melanoma, according to Bloomberg.

Galbraith also raised concerns about production. "I think that cost and turnaround time will still mean that it's challenging to scale out to the vast numbers of patients," she told Bloomberg News.

Merck $MRK and Moderna $MRNA reported detailed Phase 3 results showing that their personalized mRNA therapy, combined with Merck's Keytruda, lowered the chance of relapse or death by 42% compared with Keytruda alone in patients with completely resected stage IIB-IV melanoma. The companies are running nine Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials across tumor types.

Merck CEO Rob Davis expects the personalized vaccine to become faster to manufacture over time. The journey from tumor sequencing to delivery of the finished vaccine to the hospital takes six weeks.

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