Russian government officials have announced what could be a monumental achievement in the fight against colorectal cancer, though details are scarce.
Veronika Skvortsova, head of Russia’s Federal Medical and Biological Agency (FMBA), announced last week that the country’s cancer vaccine Enteromix, has been shown to be up to 100 percent effective in preclinical trials.
She told Russian news outlet Tass that the vaccine ‘is now ready for use; we are awaiting official approval’ from Russian regulators. However, the claims have not been independently verified.
Enteromix was successful in shrinking colorectal tumors and slowing cancer progression in the clinical trials. Russian officials also said there has been ‘promising progress’ in developing vaccines for the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma and specific types of melanoma, including ocular melanoma, at advanced stages.
It is not clear whether the vaccine was tested in humans, though, as preclinical trials in the US involve animals with a very different anatomy from humans. The vaccine is built upon an mRNA platform, the same one that underpins Covid vaccines in the US.
The mRNA Covid vaccine delivers a snippet of genetic instructions to the cells. The cells read these instructions and temporarily construct a harmless piece of the virus, known as the spike protein.
The immune system recognizes this protein as foreign and learns how to produce antibodies and other defenses against it, thereby preparing the body to fight off the real virus if it is ever exposed. The technology is not limited to just viruses, though. The platform can be programmed to target cancer cells.
It is not clear how the Russian vaccine works or how efficacious it really is. While federal officials have touted the positive results, they have not released the preclinical trial data.
Erin Verscheure was 18 when she was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer. It was 2016 and she had just graduated high school when she noticed blood in her stool
The Enteromix vaccine still requires approval from the Ministry of Health before it can be made available to patients.
Russian officials said that the vaccine shrank tumors in the colon and slowed the progression of the disease by 60 to 80 percent in preclinical trials.
State media has claimed it to be 100 percent effective in some instances.
Dr David James Pinato, a clinician scientist and consultant medical oncologist at Imperial College London, told Newsweek: ‘My concern over the quality of the data that is actually being released, from a scientific perspective, is that I cannot really fully understand what stage of development this Russian cancer vaccine is at.’
He added: ‘If this is truly preclinical results, it’s amazing, it’s interesting. It’s another one of those potential results that could then lead to a drug in the future but it’s by no means something that can be advocated for clinical use [yet].’
Several personalized mRNA cancer vaccines are currently in various stages of clinical trials and are progressing to Phase III trials in the US and abroad. But none have reached the stage of FDA approval yet.
Russian officials did not define ‘preclinical,’ which generally refers to tests done in animals and petri dishes. The government did not provide any studies documenting this latest milestone or previous stages of development.
Whether the Russian vaccine is intended for young people or adults closer to the age of most significant susceptibility is also unclear.
Colorectal cancer rates are on the rise in people in their 50s and younger, a puzzling trend to doctors who are more accustomed to seeing this type of cancer in older adults in their 60s and up.
Since 2004, incidence has climbed steadily by 1.6 percent each year in adults aged 20 to 39.
Erin Verscheure had a bowel resection, which is an operation to remove part of the small intestine, large intestine or both, followed by 12 rounds of chemotherapy. In August 2017, she was told she was in remission
The rise is even steeper for those in their early 40s, with a two percent rise annually since 2012, and early 50s showing a 2.6 percent annual rise. The long-term surge culminated in a 50 percent relative increase in diagnoses from 2021 to 2022 alone, jumping from 11.7 to 17.5 cases per 100,000 people.
In 2023, approximately 153,000 people were diagnosed with colorectal cancer and about 52,000 died, including about 19,000 cases and 3,750 deaths in people under 50.
Advancing age is the single most significant risk factor for colorectal cancer, which begins in the inner lining of the colon but can spread aggressively to other tissues.
When caught early, roughly 91 percent of patients survive. But when it approaches stages III and IV, survival rates drop to 73 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
A 2016 report found that more than three out of four younger colorectal cancer patients were diagnosed only after their cancer had already advanced, a rate notably higher than that seen in older patients (63 percent).
Death rates are falling in people 50 to 64 and people 65 and up, but they are climbing among adults 20 to 40. In people under 55, however, death rates have been increasing by about one percent per year since the mid-2000s.
Complaints like persistent fatigue, abdominal pain, or changes in bowel habits are easily dismissed by both younger patients and physicians as common issues like stress, irritable bowel syndrome, or hemorrhoids, leading to significant delays in seeking care.
And because people under 45 fall below the recommended age for routine cancer screening, there is no safety net to catch stealthy early-onset cancers in their early stages.
Carly Barrett was diagnosed with colon cancer at age 24 after detecting blood in her stool and suffering from abdominal pain
Consequently, by the time a diagnosis is finally made, often after symptoms become severe, the disease has progressed to an advanced stage, resulting in poorer outcomes.
Cancer development is not an instantaneous event, but a slow, multi-step process that can take decades, beginning when a series of genetic mutations accumulates in a single cell of the colon over time.
Each mutation provides a survival advantage, allowing multiple cells to gradually grow out of control, first forming a pre-cancerous polyp and eventually a malignant tumor.
A longer lifespan provides more time for these cumulative genetic errors to build up through normal cell division.
A body’s natural DNA repair mechanisms become less efficient, and the immune system becomes less effective at identifying and destroying abnormal cells before they can develop into cancerous cells.
The established pattern makes the recent surge in cases among younger adults, including a growing number in their 20s and 30s, especially puzzling and alarming to oncologists.
When a young person is diagnosed with an advanced Stage III or IV tumor, it indicates that the biological precursors for cancer have been aggressively building up, shrinking a process that usually takes 20 to 30 years into just 10 or 15.
The precise reason why this accelerated cancer growth is happening remains a pressing question in oncology research, with leading hypotheses pointing to modern dietary habits, environmental changes, and shifts in the gut microbiome.
The west coast as some of the nation’s highest rates of colorectal cancer, per state profiles compiled by the National Cancer Institute between 2017 and 2021
According to the latest data, early-onset colon cancer diagnoses in the US are expected to rise by 90 percent in people 20 to 34 years old between 2010 and 2030.
In teens, rates have surged 500 percent since the early 2000s.
The American Cancer Society estimates 154,270 Americans will be diagnosed with colon cancer this year, and 52,900 will die.
‘This is because very often the immune system of animal models of rodents or other species that are used to test these vaccines clinically is not reproducing the complexity of the cancer genome or the human immune system.’
Vaccine therapies are among the most promising pathways for cancer prevention and treatment, aiming to detect and destroy cancer cells.
But the US government recently announced it would cancel nearly $500 million in grants supporting the development of mRNA vaccines for flu, Covid or other infectious diseases.
The initiative to pull back funding does not extend to cancer research.
Still, some researchers are concerned that the Trump administration may clamp down on mRNA vaccines, potentially leading to a reduction in oncological research.
Dr Ryan Sullivan, a cancer vaccine researcher and physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Stat: ‘Obviously, billions of people have received an mRNA vaccine. The allusion that mRNA vaccines are unsafe is unfounded.
‘I am concerned that this could bleed over to mRNA vaccination more generally. Once some momentum gets underway for things that the government is doing, they often will extend.’
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