BALDWIN COUNTY, Ala. — What if a doctor could build a vaccine designed to fight your specific cancer, and nobody else’s?
That is the idea behind a treatment now being tested to keep melanoma from coming back — and a Baldwin County oncologist says it may represent one of the more significant developments his skin cancer patients have seen.
“This vaccine really shows what personalized medicine is all about,” said Dr. Jan Kemnade, an oncologist with Infirmary Health.
Kemnade is board-certified in internal medicine, medical oncology and hematology, and his research focuses on cancer immunotherapy.
How a Personalized Cancer Vaccine Works
The word “vaccine” is doing unfamiliar work here, and Kemnade’s explanation is worth following closely.
“So, every vaccine is unique to your cancer,” he explained. “They take your cancer and they sequence it, and they find the mutations that you have in it that are unique to that cancer that you don’t express in your body. And then they make a vaccine specific to that.”
That is the central idea. A tumor accumulates genetic mutations that healthy cells in the same body do not carry. Those mutations produce proteins that exist only in the cancer — markers that, in principle, distinguish tumor cells from everything else.
The difficulty has always been that the immune system frequently fails to recognize those markers as foreign. Cancer cells originate from the patient’s own tissue, and the immune system is built to leave that tissue alone.
A personalized vaccine attempts to correct that oversight by pointing the immune system directly at the mutations unique to a specific tumor.
The mRNA Connection
The technology behind it will sound familiar to most people, though the application is different.
“The melanoma vaccine was produced by Moderna, the same company that also made the Covid vaccine, and it’s actually a very similar technology,” Kemnade said. “It uses mRNA, which is basically the code that makes the proteins that you then develop an immune response to.”
The mechanism is the same in both cases: mRNA delivers instructions that prompt the body’s own cells to manufacture a target protein, and the immune system then learns to recognize and respond to it.
The difference is what the instructions describe. A COVID vaccine encodes a protein from a virus — the same protein for everyone who receives it, which is why it can be mass-produced. A personalized cancer vaccine encodes proteins from one patient’s tumor, which means each dose is manufactured individually after that patient’s cancer has been sequenced.
What It Is Not Meant to Do
An important clarification: this is not a vaccine that prevents melanoma from developing in the first place.
Researchers are testing it in patients whose melanoma has already been surgically removed. The goal is preventing recurrence — stopping the cancer from returning after surgery has cleared the visible disease.
That distinction defines the patient population. The vaccine is for people who have already had melanoma, not for the general public.
In the current trials, the vaccine is added to the standard treatment for melanoma rather than replacing it, with the aim of giving patients a better chance of staying cancer-free.
“They were able to cut your risk of the cancer coming back again by half,” Kemnade said. “If you do get cancer, there is more and more hope.”
Why Recurrence Is the Right Target
Focusing on recurrence rather than prevention reflects how melanoma actually behaves and where the clinical problem lies.
Surgery can remove a melanoma completely as far as imaging and pathology can determine. What surgery cannot guarantee is that no cancer cells escaped before the tumor was found. Cells that migrated elsewhere in the body may be too few to detect and may remain dormant for a long time before growing into metastatic disease.
That is the window a post-surgical vaccine is designed to address: the period after the visible cancer is gone, while any remaining cells are still few enough for an activated immune system to find and eliminate.
Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. About 1.4 million people in the United States are living with melanoma, according to the Melanoma Research Foundation.
‘We’ve Been in the Sun Our Entire Lives’
For Caitlin Walters, who was diagnosed with melanoma in 2017, the research offers something concrete.
“For those of us who have had a melanoma diagnosis, I think that it is one of the most exciting things to come out of medical research in a long time, especially here on the Gulf Coast, we’ve been in the sun our entire lives,” Walters said.
That last point is not incidental. Cumulative ultraviolet exposure is a primary melanoma risk factor, and a coastal population that spends decades outdoors on the water and the beach carries that exposure history in a way inland populations often do not.
Walters said she will be first in line when the vaccine becomes available.
“I can’t wait. I cannot wait,” she said. “I think it will help a lot of us have some peace of mind. I go every six months for skin checks and just knowing that there is something that could potentially stop melanoma from developing in the first place or stop in its tracks, I think that that is an exciting development for all of us.”
Where It Stands, and What Comes Next
The treatment remains in clinical trials, and data is still being collected. Doctors are hopeful it could reach patients as early as spring of 2027 — a timeline that depends on trial results and regulatory review, and that could move.
Kemnade was careful not to overstate where things stand while also pointing at how far the field has come.
“There is a lot more research left to be done,” he said. “But we have made tremendous advancements in the past 15 years to the point where we are curing people with melanoma that we previously had no chance to do. It shows how we really are advancing in medicine and oncology.”
“We are getting closer every day to helping more and more people,” he said.
Patients with a melanoma history who want to know whether they might be candidates for a trial should raise the question with their own oncologist. This article is reporting on medical research and is not medical advice.