[seren]

from my understanding you need a sample of the tumor to design the vaccine, so it is not OR but AND

[mlyle]

Yup. Cutting out as much as possible is going to continue to be part of the standard of care for the foreseeable future, too.

But I don't think that synthesizing some custom mRNA per-patient is at all cost prohibitive.

Formulating a lot of different batches of mRNA in lipid nanoparticles made with different mRNA might be a little complicated now, but I don't think it's an intrinsically terrible manufacturing problem.

It'll be better if this kind of technique is turns out to be applicable to more cancers, because you need to reach enough doses for economies of scale and manufacturing optimization to really kick in.

[aantix]

There's no way to determine the properties needed by imaging alone?

[giantg2]

Yeah, I would imagine they would do the minimally invasive surgey to remove as much tumor as possible and then do the immune treatment after. Maybe it would make sense to a biopsy and just the immune treatment, but my guess is it would be mkre effective the first way. At least in my personal experience with this kind of thing I would think this could improve survival rates and reduce disabilities caused or worsened by surgery by not having to achive clean margin removal of the tumor. But who knows. Maybe in the future they can extract enough tumor DNA from blood draws to create the target.

[andyjohnson0]

For this ourpose. Could a brain tumour be sampled by something less invasive like a needle biopsy?

[kjkjadksj]

The treatment is probably more effective if you capture most/all of the tumor you can. For one, maybe that alone is good enough. For two, theres the fact that many tumors are a heterogenous mixture of populations of cancer cells rather than one clonal mass of cells that are genetically identical. There is a chance you might "miss" and fail to capture a particularly malignant population that might be rare at the time of surgery but might have distant metastasis before long.

[tsoukase]

Probably not. Unfortunately it will become a mandatory step, which the MRI has substituted only in diagnosis.