This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. Today on the podcast, fighting a hard-to-treat cancer with a vaccine.

This is exciting because we can teach the immune system to recognize other deadly cancers.

This month, the Department of Health and Human Services terminated almost $500 million

in mRNA vaccine development grants and contracts. As you know, MRI vaccines have been used

for infectious diseases like COVID, but researchers are also turning to them for certain cancers.

Now, HHS has said that these cuts won't affect MRNA cancer research, but some researchers have expressed concern about the

impact on their ongoing work. A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering is developing a new

mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer, which is notoriously difficult to treat.

90% of people who are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer die from the disease, which is what makes

a new possible treatment so exciting. A few years ago, the team embarked on a small trial to

test the vaccine's safety. Sixteen patients with pancreatic cancer got it, and even embarked on a small trial to test the vaccine safety. Sixteen patients

with pancreatic cancer got it. And even though it was a small study, the results were promising.

Half the patients saw an immune response. And in a follow-up study, they found that in most

of those patients, the cancer hadn't relapsed after three years. We spoke to study author Dr. Vinoid

Balasandran earlier this year about the work, and we wanted to re-air the conversation in light of the

recent cuts to MRNA research. This work has not yet been affected by the cuts, according to

Memorial Sloan Kettering. Vinod, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having me, Flora.

So why is it so difficult to treat?

So this is an interesting question, and you might think it quite simple to answer, but...

I never think it's simple when I ask a science question.

Well, it is deceptively simple, but notoriously still hard for us to answer this.

...