What happened
- On October 23, 2026, Nature Medicine published results from the phase 2 AMPLIFY-7P trial of camupepimut (ELI-002 7P), a lymph node-targeted vaccine against KRAS gene mutations.
- Participants had stage I to III pancreatic adenocarcinoma with a KRAS mutation and no relapse within six months of standard treatment. Ninety-six were randomised to the vaccine and 48 to standard care or observation.
- The primary endpoint, disease-free survival, was not met: the median was 23.8 months with the vaccine and 21.2 months without it, a difference that was not statistically significant.
Why it matters
- The vaccine aims to train the immune system against KRAS mutations to prevent relapse after standard treatment, which is exactly the setting the trial tested.
- The negative result is the first reading. Secondary analyses suggest benefit in some groups, such as patients without circulating tumour DNA at baseline or without prior radiotherapy.
- The immune response was almost universal: 98.9% of vaccinated patients analysed produced T cells specific to mutated KRAS.
The number
23.8 versus 21.2 months. Median disease-free survival with and without the vaccine, a difference that did not reach statistical significance.
Context
The exploratory analysis shows that patients whose T cell response exceeded 9.17 times baseline, 82.2% of those treated, did better: their median disease-free survival was not reached, against 6.08 months for the rest. A post hoc multivariate analysis estimated a favourable vaccine effect. Post hoc and subgroup analyses generate hypotheses; they do not confirm efficacy. The authors include Elicio Therapeutics, which develops the vaccine. Markers that sort patients by prognosis appear in other fields, such as Alzheimer-like changes in patients with ALS.
What’s next
- The subgroup and immune response figures will shape a confirmatory trial, which would need to set them as goals from the start.
- The link between T cell response strength and relapse is the central hypothesis still to be tested.
Bottom line
The vaccine did not deliver on its main goal and still left data for the next attempt. With other vaccines, vaccination did not change smell or taste after covid. The search for biological subgroups recurs in the circadian subtype of depression found in Sydney, and tailor-made molecule design in Pinal, which designs proteins from a sentence.
Sources
- Nature Medicine — Lymph node-targeted, mKRAS-specific amphiphile vaccine in pancreatic cancer: the randomized phase 2 AMPLIFY-7P trial (October 23, 2026)
- Cover image: Mikael Häggström, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Edited by Rodrigo Cornejo. How we select and verify: who writes these notes.
