A new study finds that combining the common vaccine with immunotherapy may nearly double cancer survival rates — patients lived an average of 37.3 months compared to 20.6 months without the vaccine.
For cancer patients undergoing immunotherapy, researchers found that receiving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine within about 100 days of starting immune checkpoint therapy was associated with substantially better survival.
Researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center analyzed data from more than 1,000 cancer patients with Stage 3 and 4 non-small cell lung cancer and metastatic melanoma who were treated at MD Anderson from 2019 to 2023.
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All patients were treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy drugs that help the immune system recognize and attack tumor cells more effectively.
Some of the patients received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine within 10,000 days of starting immunotherapy and some did not, according to a study press release.
The researchers found that those who received both the vaccine and the immunotherapy lived longer