Donna Gustafson was 72 years old and facing one of the most feared diagnoses in medicine. Pancreatic cancer kills roughly 87% of patients within five years.
But today, the New Jersey grandmother is cancer-free, and researchers say she may hold a key to changing those devastating odds.
Gustafson was the first person to receive an experimental mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She had traveled there for surgery to remove her tumor and was scheduled to begin chemotherapy when doctors offered her something different.
“It was a no-brainer,” Gustafson said. “I knew that statistically, the odds were against me.”
The treatment is personalized. Researchers take the patient’s own tumor and use it to create a custom mRNA vaccine — similar in design to COVID-19 vaccines — that teaches the immune system to identify and attack the patient’s specific cancer cells.
Gustafson received eight infusions of the vaccine, completed chemotherapy, and received a booster. She is now cancer-free.
Gustafson’s story is part of new findings being presented at a major cancer conference. In a Phase 1 trial of 16 patients, eight had a measurable response to the vaccine. Two of those patients later saw their cancer return. Gustafson was not among them.
Dr. Vinod Balachandran, a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering, described the stakes of the work.
“Pancreatic cancer is the toughest,” Balachandran said. “So our hope is, if we can crack the toughest, hopefully we can learn how to crack the rest.”
Perhaps most remarkable: doctors say that six years after Gustafson received the vaccine, they can still detect the immune cells it created circulating in her blood, at very high levels.
For Gustafson, the results go beyond any medical data point.
“Ed and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary,” she said. “I was here to see two more of my grandchildren.”
She describes waking up every day in a state of gratefulness.
“Every day I wake up and thank God I’m here.”