HonorHealth researchers are using a vaccine to track down hidden cancer cells

The American Cancer Society estimates there were nearly 105,000 cases of melanoma reported in the United States in 2025. Between 1995 and 2023, the Arizona Department of Health Services says there were more than 17,000 melanoma diagnoses in Arizona.

Physicians at HonorHealth Research Institute, though, have been working on a new treatment, in the form of a vaccine. Earlier trials have shown promise in treating glioblastoma, the most common type of brain tumor. This comes as the drugmaker Moderna says a similar vaccine was successful in a clinical trial of melanoma patients.

Dr. Joseph Georges is a neurosurgeon at Scottsdale Neurosurgery Specialists based at the Bob Bové Neuroscience Institute at HonorHealth. He’s also an assistant professor of clinical practice at Arizona State University's John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering and has been working on this.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Dr. Georges, what could this treatment option be? And I wonder if there’s a semantic question here, too, because it’s being described as a vaccine, and for lots of us, we think about a vaccine as something to prevent you from getting sick, as opposed to treating you once you are.

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JOSEPH GEORGES: That is a great question. And I think to answer that, you have to start at the level of the immune system. So all of us, our immune systems are designed to identify germs or pathogens in the body and target and destroy them before they can cause us a problem. It doesn’t just stop there. Our immune system can actually detect cancer cells and destroy them before they can cause us a problem, and our immune systems are constantly doing this, they’re surveying the landscape and looking for abnormal cells.

Cancer, such as melanoma, they can get very good at camouflaging themselves, so our immune system can no longer identify them as abnormal, and it allows them to grow, develop tumors and potentially spread throughout the body.

So what a vaccine does is it re-educates the immune system to identify these camouflaged cells and once again seek them out and destroy them.

MARK BRODIE: So how exactly do you try to do that? It sounds like you’re almost giving a scent to a crime-fighting dog or something like that to try to search out these camouflaged melanoma cells.

JOSEPH GEORGES: Yes, it’s very much what we’re doing. So we obtain a biopsy from the patient, and then we use protein and mRNA. So what’s important about this vaccine, it’s a double-loaded dendritic cell vaccine. It’s using mRNA and protein, not just one of those items.

And what we’ve found in preclinical studies is when we educate the dendritic cells with both protein and mRNA, we get an almost 10-fold increase in the immune response that we would have gotten with just using mRNA or just protein alone. So we extract dendritic cells from the patient’s bloodstream, and what those are, they’re basically the scouts of the immune system. They’re constantly traveling throughout the body, and those are the cells that identify abnormal things and report back to our immune system to then mount an attack against those abnormalities.

So we extract these dendritic cells from the patient, we train them with the protein and the mRNA that we extract from the patient’s own tumor, and then we make them a very personalized vaccine that targets just their cancer. And it allows their immune system to very naturally once again identify and destroy these cancer cells.

MARK BRODIE: Given that you are taking samples, as you say, from each patient, is that to suggest that something like this, at least at this stage, would not necessarily be useful as a typical preventative vaccine, since if you’re taking something from the patient, you obviously can’t do that if they don’t have cancer yet?

JOSEPH GEORGES: Correct, but cancers happen at many stages. So if you have a very localized tumor that hasn’t spread through the body, you could still isolate it, and the question I have is, if you provide a vaccine to somebody like that, could you potentially prevent them from developing further cancer throughout their body?

That’s very important for me as a neurosurgeon looking at melanoma because it is a different organ system. But of all the cancers we see, melanoma has the highest likelihood to spread to the brain. So if we can identify it early, a question I have is, if a patient were to be vaccinated at that point, could we prevent it from ever going to the brain?

MARK BRODIE: Well, that’s really interesting, because I was going to ask if you have reason to believe that if a melanoma patient gets this vaccine, if it would maybe lower the risk of melanoma reappearing, of coming back in a patient. But it sounds like there’s also the possibility that it could help it spread and maybe prevent cancers elsewhere.

JOSEPH GEORGES: That’s the hope, and that’s what we are — well, that’s one of the end points we’re evaluating in this clinical trial.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have reason to think that this might be effective for other types of cancer to begin with, in addition to melanoma patients, like patients with other types of cancer this could be effective in?

JOSEPH GEORGES: Oh, absolutely. So this actually started with work when we collaborated to develop a vaccine for glioblastoma, and that clinical trial opened in 2021 and finished enrolling two years later.

And we saw on average patients who enrolled in that trial have done far better than ever expected with no significant side effects. And we have another clinical trial using the same vaccine technology for pancreatic cancer as well.

MARK BRODIE: Is there anything similar about those particular types of cancer that might lend them to all working or having success with similar types of treatments?

JOSEPH GEORGES: They’re very different cancers, and what’s exciting was to see a potentially positive signal in glioblastoma because historically that has been one of the most aggressive and difficult cancers to treat, especially for the immune system to target. It’s very challenging for our immune system to identify glioblastoma. Melanoma, on the other hand, is almost the opposite.

We’ve found that when we can bolster the immune system in patients with various medications, the immune system can do a good job of targeting and controlling that tumor, at least for a time.

MARK BRODIE: Is the thinking, at least at this point, that assuming that the tests and the trials continue to work positively, that this kind of treatment would be used in conjunction with other traditional forms of cancer treatment? Might this be all a patient needs?

JOSEPH GEORGES: It’s possible. The way we design these trials is that the vaccine is in addition to other treatments that could potentially help the patient. So it comes down to the discretion of the oncologist. We don’t want any patient to have to forego a treatment that could potentially help them.

You may have seen there was a Moderna vaccine that was in the news. So with their vaccine, it was their vaccine, which is an mRNA vaccine, plus a checkpoint inhibitor. So could something like that work with our vaccine? We will see, but we do have patients that are receiving our vaccine that may or may not be responding to the checkpoint inhibitors anymore.

MARK BRODIE: Are there reasons to think that it is better for the body if you’re using its own immune system to fight cancer as opposed to having to use chemotherapy or radiation or other things like that?

JOSEPH GEORGES: Well, the immune system, it’s a more natural way to control and kill cancer. We see sometimes when patients start failing therapies, they’re willing to trade some terrible side effects with chemotherapeutics with the hope that they’ll have some help, that they may help.

But with this double-loaded dendritic cell vaccine that AIVAC has developed, we’ve seen that patients don’t get sick, they don’t lose their hair, so the side effect profile seems much more favorable than some other treatment options out there.

MARK BRODIE: Ultimately, do you think this could be something that would be functional for every form of cancer that’s out there?

JOSEPH GEORGES: I think there’s a very good chance, yes. I think if the immune system can be educated how to once detect these abnormal cells again, I think it could be effective across a full complement of cancer types.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Dr. Joseph Georges, a neurosurgeon at Scottsdale Neurosurgeon Specialists based out of the Bob Bové Neuroscience Institute at HonorHealth. He’s also an assistant professor of clinical practice at ASU’s John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering. Dr. Georges, thanks so much, I appreciate it.

JOSEPH GEORGES: Thank you, appreciate it.

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