The discovery that mRNA vaccines were powerful immune activators came from research conducted by Grippin during his graduate work at the University of Florida in the lab of Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D. While developing personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccines for brain tumors, Grippin and Sayour found that mRNA vaccines trained immune systems to eliminate cancer cells, even when the mRNA didn’t target tumors directly.
This finding led to the hypothesis that other types of mRNA vaccines might have the same effect, and the approval and use of mRNA-based COVID vaccines created an opportunity to test this hypothesis. Lin and Grippin initiated a major effort to retrospectively study if MD Anderson patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines lived longer than those who did not receive these vaccines.
ESMO 2025: mRNA-based COVID vaccines generate improved responses to immunotherapy | UT MD Anderson