Sydney scientist behind ‘moon landing’ cancer vaccine wins top science prize

The scientist who transformed advanced melanoma into a treatable cancer and led a recent large-scale trial into a world-first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine has won the research prize at Australia’s premier science awards.

Professor Georgina Long was cautious to discuss the melanoma vaccine trial given that full results won’t be released until October, but described it as an “absolute landmark, fork-in-the-road for cancer” ahead of being awarded the Eureka Prize for Scientific Research at the Australian Museum on Thursday night.

“It represents a huge body of work and team effort, and it’s an honour, really, to represent all the people that I lead,” the former Australian of the Year said of the award.

“We’re a small but mighty country. We’ve got to keep the investments in Australia. We’ve got to take greater risks.”

Long is on a sabbatical in Lisbon, Portugal, away from her duties as medical director of the Melanoma Institute Australia at the University of Sydney to think and plan the next stages of her research.

The new vaccine, developed by Moderna and Merck, aims to prevent recurrence of melanoma after a tumour is removed. Long was the principal investigator of the phase 3 trial and said it provided “the first real data that demonstrates mRNA technology can absolutely change the face of cancer”.

Without yet providing details, the companies said on August 20 that the late-stage trial produced clinically and statistically significant improvements in high-risk melanoma patients. Moderna’s market value leapt by $62 billion in a day.

“We are not even a speck of dust in this universe. And there’s only one point: to make a difference as much as you can, and do it well.”

Professor Georgina Long

For the trial, 1137 high-risk melanoma patients were given the cancer drug Keytruda. Half also received the experimental vaccine.

Researchers sequenced patients’ tumours after surgery and identified mutations, unique to each person’s cancer, that code for abnormal proteins on the surface of cancer cells called neoantigens.

A custom mRNA vaccine was crafted for each patient based on the specific neoantigens in their tumour, teaching the immune system exactly what to look for.

Normal cells have proteins which stop the immune system attacking healthy tissue. Melanomas hijack these cellular signals, masquerading as normal cells and growing unchecked.

Keytruda stops this from happening, ripping off melanoma’s invisibility cloak.

Results presented from a much smaller phase 2 trial in June showed combining Keytruda and the vaccine led to a 49 per cent reduction in the risk of recurrence or death, compared to just the cancer drug.

As the president of Merck put it, the mRNA vaccine, called intismeran autogene, gives the immune system the scent of the enemy. Then Keytruda releases “the dogs of war”.

“It is a moon-landing moment,” Long said. Others are investigating whether the same approach could work in lung and pancreatic cancer.

The award on Thursday was in recognition of more than a decade of research. When Long started working in melanoma, faces in her waiting room would change within six to nine months.

“It was the orphan cancer up until about 15 years ago. You think of the worst cancers now, and I can name them – pancreatic cancer [and] glioblastoma – melanoma was worse than those two. Nothing worked … chemotherapy did nothing.

“The waiting room would be completely different because people died, and the majority of people died within 12 months.”

Long and her collaborators have turned that story around.

A trial Long led in 2018 found combining two immunotherapy drugs – nivolumab and ipilimumab – had a 46 per cent response rate in patients with melanoma that had metastasised to the brain, compared with 20 per cent when just one drug was used.

The finding changed clinical practice “overnight”. Seven-year follow-up data reported in The Lancet Oncology last year found 51 per cent of patients given the combination immunotherapy as a first-line treatment had survived, compared with 29 per cent on the single drug.

That’s just some of Long’s work, which is credited with ushering the survival rate of advanced melanoma from 5 to 50 per cent. She and colleague Professor Richard Scolyer were named Australians of the Year in 2024 for their research on cancer.

Crucially, tactics pioneered in melanoma treatment have gone on to have a “massive impact” in cancers of the lung, kidney, head, neck and bladder and some lymphomas, Long said.

“Every single drug developed in melanoma first … has gone on to impact an extraordinary number of patients with other cancers,” Long said.

Long’s focus is on the patients resistant to treatment: the difficult territory between what we know and don’t know where “courageous medicine happens”, such as the testing of drugs never trialled in people. She calls it the “third space”.

“We’ve cured 50 per cent, [but] we’ve still got 50 per cent who die, and they die quickly like the old days. They are our third space,” she said.

“We’re all on this planet for a tiny, tiny, tiny time. We are not even a speck of dust in this universe. And there’s only one point: to make a difference as much as you can, and do it well.”

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