Clinical development of mRNA therapies against solid tumors.

ABSTRACT

The mRNA-based therapeutics have become the hot spot of biopharmaceutical industries in recent years. The landscape of this area is expanding from infectious disease to cancer, which needs to be summarized to provide data supports for industries and research institutions. Based on the Trialtrove database, a total of 108 clinical trials from 1999 to 2021 were retrospectively analyzed. We have demonstrated that the clinical development of mRNA therapies against solid tumors is still at an early stage. There are evolutions in delivery systems from the dendritic cell to the lipid-based platform and in encoding strategies from the fixed tumor antigens to the personalized neoantigens. The adjuvant or maintenance therapy and the combination treatment with checkpoint inhibitors are becoming the major clinical development orientation.