By Nancy Lapid
London: Cancer patients who received mRNA-based COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting treatment with widely used immunotherapies were twice as likely to be alive three years after beginning treatment, researchers reported.
Among 180 such patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who received an mRNA-based COVID vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech , the median survival, or the point at which half the patients had died, was 37.33 months. Among 704 cancer patients who did not receive an mRNA COVID shot, median survival was 20.6 months.
Among patients with metastatic melanoma - the most deadly form of skin cancer - half of the 167 patients who did not receive a vaccine had died by 26.67 months. Of the 43 melanoma patients who did receive a vaccine, more