A personalised mRNA vaccine for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is expected to be approved for use in the US, Europe and the UK next year. The vaccine is designed to stimulate immune responses against genetic mutations that are unique to an individual’s cancer. When used alongside standard treatment in a late-stage trial, it substantially cut the risk of cancer recurrence or death within the next two years.

“I think approval could be quick, and next year sounds reasonable,” says at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, who wasn’t involved in the trial.

“It is a huge deal,” says at the University of Manchester, UK, who also wasn’t involved. Thousands of people in the UK alone could benefit from this, based on the trial’s patient population, she says. “It’s highly likely the US and Europe [including the UK] will approve it next year.” However, producing the vaccine is very expensive, and it may not be deemed cost-effective for use on the UK’s National 91ɫ��Ƭ Services (NHS), she says.

In August, drug-maker Moderna announced that the vaccine had positive results in a late-stage trial. More specific findings have now been released.

The trial recruited more than 1100 adults who had surgery to remove high-risk melanomas that were likely to recur or spread to distant sites. In the UK, are diagnosed annually, of which are deemed high risk.

Two-thirds of the participants were randomly assigned to receive a bespoke vaccine on top of standard immunotherapy, called pembrolizumab, which helps the immune system find and destroy cancer. Both were delivered every three weeks for up to a year. The remaining participants received placebo injections plus pembrolizumab.

The vaccine is made by genetically sequencing a small sample of a person’s cancer and comparing that sequence with the DNA in the individual’s healthy blood cells. This enables researchers to pinpoint mutations specific to the cancer.

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Based on the same technology used in covid-19 vaccines, the cancer vaccine contains mRNA molecules that encode for proteins with up to 34 of those mutations. “The jab contains a fingerprint of proteins specifically associated with the cancer,” says Lee. “This helps [immune] T-cells recognise the cancer better, and then pembrolizumab prevents those T-cells from becoming exhausted once they’ve started attacking the cancer cells.”

About two years after the start of treatment, 82 per cent of the participants who received the vaccine plus pembrolizumab were alive without their cancer recurring, on average, compared with 70 per cent among those on pembrolizumab alone. “It’s a really exciting result,” says Lee. Side effects were similar between the two groups.

The results combine cancer recurrence and death rates into one figure, but since a treated cancer has to recur for it to cause death, this combined measure should be interpreted mostly as a sign of the vaccine reducing recurrence, says Melcher. The participants haven’t been tracked for long enough to robustly determine whether the vaccine improves survival rates. These results should be available within a few years, says Lee.

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But because the vaccine has to be tailored to and manufactured for each individual, it is expected to be very costly, which could affect NHS access. “If it was a cheap drug, I’d definitely say it will get approved [for NHS use], but it’s going to be expensive,” says Lee. In January, a report by suggested it would cost around $200,000 per treatment. Moderna and Merck (also known as MSD), which was also involved in the vaccine’s development, did not respond to a request about its cost.

Further research is needed to better understand who is mostly likely to benefit from the vaccine, says Melcher. Some people may have mutations included in their vaccine that fail to stimulate anti-cancer immunity as predicted, or pembrolizumab could work so well that the vaccine can’t lead to further improvement. “If we can find immune markers in the blood or tumour that predict patient responses, we could use those to determine who to give the jab to,” says Melcher.

, also at the Institute of Cancer Research, says personalised vaccines could also work for other types of cancer, such as those affecting the lungs, bladder and kidneys, which are also routinely treated with immunotherapy. Further research is needed to verify this and explore whether the vaccines could work as standalone treatments.

Psilocybin may prevent a debilitating side effect of chemotherapy: nerve damage that can cause lasting numbness, tingling or pain in the hands and feet. In tests in nerve samples from mice and humans, the psychedelic seemed to maintain the energy supply in nerve endings that is commonly disrupted by chemotherapy, resulting in less damage and fewer complications.

This is the first time a therapy has been shown to prevent this common side effect, which lacks effective treatments and can limit access to cancer drugs.

“If these findings can be replicated in clinical trials, the implications could be substantial,” says at the University of Reading in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Patients could avoid long-lasting sensory problems and chronic pain that often remain after cancer has been successfully treated.”

What’s more, “if nerve damage can be prevented, fewer patients may need dose reductions or interruptions of chemotherapy, potentially improving cancer outcomes”, she says.

But people with cancer shouldn’t take psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, without medical supervision. “Please don’t take psilocybin at home for chemotherapy-related pain,” says team member at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “It hasn’t been shown to be safe or effective in patients undergoing chemotherapy. It can interact dangerously with cancer medications.”

Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) affects about 75 per cent of cancer patients who undergo the treatment to some extent, said , also at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, in a press briefing. It is usually treated with duloxetine, an antidepressant that provides moderate pain relief. But no drug had been shown to prevent CIPN, said Amit at the briefing.

CIPN occurs when chemotherapy drugs enter nerve cells and . These are railway-like structures that usually transport mitochondria from the main body of neurons, near the spinal cord, to nerve endings in the skin. The mitochondria supply energy to maintain nerve endings, but the disruption means they wear out and retract, causing issues like tingling.

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The researchers wondered whether psilocybin, , could preserve these nerve endings.

To find out, they studied a group of mice with abdominal tumours, half of which were given two doses of psilocybin – each equivalent to a 25-milligram dose in people – via injections into the abdomen, one week apart. The remaining mice had saline injections. All of them then received daily injections of cisplatin, a type of chemotherapy that commonly causes CIPN, for one week.

After receiving cisplatin, the mice underwent pain-sensitivity tests, where they were touched with a thin plastic filament to see how they responded. Those that received psilocybin before cisplatin responded similarly to a third group of mice with cancer that didn’t receive cisplatin or psilocybin. The mice that received cisplatin without psilocybin seemed to be much more sensitive to the filament’s touch.

To explore how psilocybin may be having this effect, the team analysed nerve samples from the mice. This showed that, after the psychedelic is processed to its active ingredient, psilocin, it activates a receptor called 5HT2A, . But it also revealed that this receptor sends molecular signals that prevent chemotherapy-related disruption of mitochondrial transport.

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Finally, the researchers confirmed the results in human neurons treated with either psilocybin or a saline solution before receiving cisplatin. “Psilocybin seemed to help nerves withstand the toxic effects of chemotherapy and maintain normal function,” says Maiaru.

They now plan to begin a . This will be made up of about 80 people with breast, colorectal or head and neck cancer, testing two doses of psilocybin before chemotherapy. Results are expected in about five years. 

Psilocybin has already been shown to relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety in people with cancer. Although not a psychedelic, cannabis is also approved to treat in the UK. The US Food and Drug Administration has also that are made up of chemicals similar to those in cannabis to relieve chemotherapy-related nausea and vomiting.

Every cancer is different. Because of that, researchers have for decades been working on personalised cancer vaccines designed to make the immune system recognise and attack cancers specific to each individual. The results have been mixed, but now a personalised cancer vaccine has produced positive results in a final-stage trial for the first time.

that people who had undergone surgery to remove severe skin cancers, called melanomas, survived longer without the cancer returning or spreading to other parts of the body if they were given a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine in conjunction with another immunotherapy, compared with receiving that immunotherapy alone.

The hope is that this personalised vaccine will work for many other types of cancer. Trials are already underway for . The other big mRNA company, BioNTech, is also testing personalised cancer vaccines in human trials.

What is a cancer vaccine?

Cancers are caused by cells accumulating mutations to the point where they go rogue and start multiplying out of control. Mutations in proteins that protrude from the surface of cells also make cancer cells “look” a bit different to other cells. This allows our immune system to recognise and kill off many cancers without us ever knowing about it. But some cancers slip through the net – the idea of cancer vaccines is to teach the immune system to recognise them.

How are these vaccines made?

In the case of the Moderna vaccine, called , a sample of a person’s cancer – a biopsy – is sequenced. It is then compared with their healthy blood cells to identify surface proteins on the cancerous cells that have distinctive mutations. Up to 34 are selected, and mRNAs coding for those proteins are made and put in the vaccine.

What happens next?

The cancer vaccine is injected into muscles, just like with the covid-19 mRNA vaccine. Cells in the muscles then temporarily produce the cancer proteins, triggering an immune response to them.

Why use mRNA vaccine technology?

It is possible to use other kinds of vaccines, but mRNA has two huge advantages: speed and cost. Making protein-based vaccines requires using living cells, which is time-consuming and requires many safety checks. For people with cancer, the faster a vaccine can be created, the better.

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What immunotherapy was the vaccine combined with for the trial?

It is a so-called anti-PD-1 therapy consisting of an antibody called pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Many cancers evolve to evade immune attack by putting up a “don’t attack me” sign. Immune cells “read” this sign with the help of a protein on their surface called PD-1.

Blocking PD-1 makes the “don’t attack me” sign invisible to immune cells, so they attack regardless. However, anti-PD-1 treatments work only if the immune system is already trying to attack a cancer, hence the advantage of combining them with a cancer vaccine to provoke that attack.

How well did the combined treatment work?

Moderna hasn’t told us yet. The company has announced only that the results of the phase III trial “demonstrate statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements” in survival times.

The trial involved 1137 people who, after surgery to remove melanomas, were randomly assigned to get both the vaccine and pembrolizumab, or just pembrolizumab. What we do know is that in an earlier trial involving 157 people with melanoma over five years, the combination of the vaccine and pembrolizumab cut the risk of recurrence by 50 per cent and the risk of spread to other parts of the body by 60 per cent, compared with pembrolizumab alone.

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When will this treatment become available?

Analysts speaking to the say it could be approved next year. But because it is an individualised treatment, scaling up production will be much more complex than with a standard vaccine.

It also isn’t clear yet what the pricing will be – even with the help of mRNA technology, it won’t be cheap. A suggested it would cost around $200,000 per treatment. No wonder Moderna’s share price is soaring.

Will this work for all cancers?

The hope is it will work for many cancers, but we will have to wait on more phase III trial results to be sure. That said, several other earlier-stage mRNA cancer vaccine trials have produced promising results. In fact, a study last year estimated that on the basis of these results, their potential health benefits could be worth around $75 billion a year in the US alone.

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Are there any approved cancer vaccines already?

Not like intismeran autogene. Some sources will tell you for treating cancer: Provenge, BCG and T-VEC.

But Provenge is a treatment that involves removing immune cells from a person’s body, exposing them to a prostate cancer protein, then replacing them. BCG is the tuberculosis vaccine, which just happens to help treat some bladder cancers for reasons we still don’t understand. And T-VEC is a live herpes simplex virus engineered to kill cancer cells.

So only one of the three is a conventional vaccine, and its anti-cancer action is completely incidental.

What about the HPV and hepatitis vaccines?

These vaccines prevent infections by viruses that can cause cancers, rather than targeting cancers directly, which is an even better approach. The HPV vaccine has proved incredibly effective at preventing cervical cancer, for instance.

When the sun is out, many of us reach for sunscreen, but myths and misinformation have left some people confused about when and how to use it, and how to ensure we still get enough vitamin D. , a skin cancer expert at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia, has led clinical trials looking at the link between sun exposure and skin cancer, and sunscreen use and vitamin D. She also recently led the development of a new that considers how to balance the risks and benefits of sun exposure. Here, she lists five things that everyone should know about sunscreen.

Sunscreen should be used as a last line of defence

Many people think it’s OK to lie on the beach all day in a tiny bikini as long as they rub sunscreen all over their exposed skin and reapply it every 2 hours. They think sunscreen makes them bulletproof. But even if you apply the best sunscreen perfectly, it still lets some ultraviolet (UV) radiation through. If you’re out in the sun for hours, that gradually adds up to a dose that is big enough to cause skin damage. At that point, it doesn’t matter if you apply more sunscreen; the damage is already done.

People often assume that if they reapply sunscreen every 2 hours, they’re sort of starting the protection again, but that’s not how it works. You also need to protect yourself with a hat, sunglasses, rash shirt or other protective clothing, and stay in the shade in the middle of the day. Sunscreen should be considered a last line of defence for the parts of your skin that you can’t easily cover while you’re outdoors, like your hands and neck.

There is good evidence that sunscreen protects against skin cancer and wrinkles

The largest, longest-running study of sunscreen was conducted in the Australian town of Nambour. In 1992, 1600 people in the town were randomised to apply daily sunscreen or continue with their normal sunscreen use, which tended to be minimal. It found that those who applied the daily sunscreen were years down the track.

The researchers also created moulds of the backs of the study participants’ hands to look at damage to the surface of the skin. Those in the daily sunscreen group had compared with those who didn’t. When they were followed up on in 2014, they also had .

The sunscreen to choose is the one you like wearing

It’s no good having sunscreen that sits in your cupboard and doesn’t end up on your skin because you don’t like the feel of it. If you’re going on a hike and you’re going to be out all day, it’s better to wear sunscreen with a high sun protection factor (SPF) of 50+. But it’s harder to get a high-SPF sunscreen that feels really nice, so if you’ll be popping out for only short periods throughout the day, you can choose an SPF 15 or 30 sunscreen. Tinted sunscreens can offer the same protection as normal sunscreens, but only if you apply them thickly. But because these often make the skin look overly tinted, people tend to apply them too thinly. One option is to first put on a thick layer of normal sunscreen, then apply the tinted sunscreen on top of it.

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Chemical sunscreens, meaning those that contain organic ingredients such as octocrylene and avobenzone, work by absorbing UV radiation from the sun and converting it to harmless heat. Inorganic sunscreens, also known as mineral or physical sunscreens, contain zinc oxide or titanium dioxide particles. They are often reported to work by reflecting or scattering UV radiation, but they actually , like chemical sunscreens.

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Wearing two layers of sunscreen helps to achieve adequate coverage

You get the SPF listed on the bottle only if you apply 2 milligrams of sunscreen per square centimetre of skin, which is around in an average adult. But it’s really hard to apply this amount of sunscreen in one go. One day, I decided to measure it out exactly, and I couldn’t rub it all on; it was too much. So now, I apply one layer, let it sink in while I brush my teeth and do other things, and then a second layer, so I can apply the full recommended amount.

I was born in Armidale, Australia, in the late 1960s and didn’t wear sunscreen as a child, despite my pale skin. I’ve since had three skin cancers removed, the first of which appeared when I was just 29. So now, I am careful to protect my skin.

If you’re diligent with sunscreen, you might need to take a vitamin D supplement

We recently conducted a trial called the Sun-D Study to see whether applying SPF 50+ sunscreen every day affects people’s vitamin D levels. We randomly assigned 639 people to apply SPF 50+ sunscreen as part of their daily morning routine on days when the UV index was forecast to reach 3 or higher, or to use it at their own discretion. After about a year, a – about 46 per cent compared with 37 per cent in the control group. If you wear sunscreen every day, I would advise taking a vitamin D supplement so that you don’t become deficient, especially in winter. I take one myself – they are cheap, safe and effective.

People with dark-coloured skin are at greater risk of developing a vitamin D deficiency. I recently led the development of a new that looked at how to balance the various risks and benefits of sun exposure. It brought together experts from many Australian universities and medical organisations, and it concluded that people with dark-coloured skin need to put on sunscreen only if they plan to spend more than 2 hours outdoors on days with high UV radiation levels. This is in recognition of the fact that melanoma incidence is 30 times lower in people with dark-coloured skin than in those with light-coloured skin, and that vitamin D deficiency poses a greater risk.

No women in England aged 20 to 24 died of cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024. This is the first time that zero cervical-cancer deaths have been recorded for this age group, and it’s thanks to the introduction of a vaccine against the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

“The results are stunning,” says at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s an awful thing when somebody dies very young from cervical cancer. This is a real triumph for vaccination, a real triumph for science and a real triumph for public health to get that vaccine out there with very high uptake very rapidly.”

HPV is spread by several kinds of sexual activity, and many strains genetically modify cells in a way that is extremely likely to cause cancer. Women can get cervical cancer in their twenties because of the virus, and around the world many are still dying because of it.

The first HPV vaccine became available in 2006. In the UK, it has been offered to girls aged 12 or 13 since 2008. It’s been offered to boys since 2019, both to protect them from other HPV-triggered cancers – like those affecting the mouth, anus, throat and penis – and to prevent them from infecting others.

The study is the first evidence that the HPV vaccine prevents cervical-cancer-related deaths, in addition to dramatically reducing HPV infections and . It may seem obvious that it prevents deaths, but we know that the women who are least likely to get vaccinated are also the least likely to go for screening, says Sasieni. So, there was a worry that the vaccine has mainly been preventing cancers that would have been detected early by screening and successfully treated, but not preventing those that would get missed by screening and therefore be more likely to kill women.

Fortunately, . Sasieni and his colleague , also at Queen Mary, have been monitoring cervical-cancer rates and deaths in England, and noticed that between 2020 and 2024 – the most recent data available – there were no deaths among women aged 20 to 24. Based on historical rates, around 23 deaths would be expected. “As far back as I’ve seen data, there’s never been a year with none, and so five years in a row with no deaths is really quite something,” says Sasieni.

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The dramatic drop is almost certainly due to the HPV vaccine – around 90 per cent of women in England aged 20 to 24 were vaccinated when they were 12 or 13. “This hugely encouraging news shows the life-saving impact of the HPV vaccine, and it’s incredibly exciting to be able to say to this whole generation: cervical cancer and some other cancers shouldn’t be a risk for you,” says , director of vaccination for the National 91ɫ��Ƭ Service (NHS) in England.

While this study looked only at cervical cancer, the benefits of this vaccine also apply to other HPV-related cancers. It should also protect against warts on the skin and genital and anal areas in both sexes.

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Sasieni and Falcaro note that there were some deaths among women aged 25 to 29, but far fewer than would be expected. Altogether, they estimate around 200 lives have already been saved, and this is just the start. “The 200 which we’ve estimated in the paper is really just the tip of the iceberg, because it looks like there’s long-term protection against infection,” says Sasieni. “In the future, 18,000 deaths might be a rough estimate of what we’re preventing so far.”

Worldwide, however, uptake of the HPV vaccine is low and the rate of cervical cancer is still rising. Death rates may also rise in the UK because fewer teenagers are getting vaccinated. “The bad news is that the vaccine uptake has fallen quite dramatically since covid,” says Sasieni.

“Alongside cervical screening, HPV vaccination is central to the NHS ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040,” says Temmink. “It’s a safe and effective vaccine and we urge everyone eligible to take up the offer when invited.”