Personalized cancer vaccines recently became red hot with Merck and Moderna’s news about their melanoma vaccine’s remarkable Phase III trial results. Now, underdog BriaCell Therapeutics is hoping to catch that wave, and the company is in a good position to do so. With a technology distinct from Merck and Moderna’s mRNA approach, breast cancer and prostate products close to market, and its melanoma vaccine program advancing, BriaCell is making its move.

“What we are doing is developing a personalized but off-the-shelf cellular immunotherapy for cancer,” William V. Williams, MD, told Inside Precision Medicine. Williams is president and chief executive officer of BriaCell

This Monday, BriaCell announced that Bria-MEL+, its personalized whole cell melanoma immunotherapy vaccine candidate, has achieved a “key genetic engineering milestone, advancing the program toward clinical development.”

The American Cancer Society estimates that approximately 112,000 new cases of melanomas will be diagnosed in the United States in 2026, including about 65,400 in men and 46,600 in women. Based on 2021–2023 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data, approximately 2.2% of men and women will be diagnosed with skin melanoma during their lifetime. Melanoma accounts for only about one percent of skin cancers but causes a large majority of skin cancer deaths.

Bria-MEL+ is a cell-based therapeutic cancer vaccine designed to harness a patient’s own immune system to combat melanoma. The program is personalized yet “off-the-shelf”: a simple patient saliva test will determine which of the several premanufactured treatment cell lines will be selected for personalized treatment, avoiding the need to manufacture a unique product for each individual patient.

“Bria-MEL+ is designed to combine the advantages of personalized immunotherapy with the accessibility of an off-the-shelf vaccine,” said Williams. “By eliminating individualized manufacturing, we believe this approach has the potential to broaden access, shorten treatment timelines, and reduce treatment costs while preserving patient-specific matching.”

“Building on the encouraging efficacy and tolerability results from BriaCell’s metastatic breast cancer immunotherapy program, we continue to expand our pipeline with additional personalized, cell-based immunotherapy vaccine candidates, including Bria-MEL+ for melanoma,” said Miguel A. Lopez-Lago, PhD, BriaCell’s chief scientific officer.

Bria-MEL+  is designed to activate multiple components of the immune system, including innate and adaptive immune responses, to target and destroy melanoma cells. The program is derived from BriaCell’s Bria-OTS+ (off-the-shelf) cellular immunotherapy platform and is being developed using premanufactured cell lines selected through patient HLA matching.

Bria-MEL+ expands the company’s personalized immunotherapy platform which is led by Bria-IMT, currently in a pivotal Phase III trial for metastatic breast cancer. BriaCell is also advancing Bria-OTS in breast cancer, in which the first patient dosed experienced sustained complete resolution of a lung metastasis, and Bria-PROS+ in prostate cancer which has recently received FDA clearance to initiate clinical evaluation. The Bria-MEL+, Bria-PROS+, and Bria-OTS programs are based on matching patient HLA type with the corresponding immunotherapy cell line.

Earlier In 2026, BriaCell reported preclinical data from the Bria-OTS+ platform at the AACR Annual Meeting, Bria-OTS+ demonstrated activation of both adaptive and innate immunity, including naïve/resting T cells, dendritic cells, and natural killer (NK) cells, inducing immune memory and eliciting “serial killer” activity against cancer cells.

BriaCell believes this multipronged immune activation supports the potential of the Bria-OTS+ platform to generate anti-tumor immune responses and informs the development of  s Bria-MEL+ for melanoma. 

BriaCell also announced this month that the FDA has completed its review of the Investigational New Drug application for Bria-PROS+ and issued a Study May Proceed letter for the personalized, off-the-shelf, cell-based immunotherapy for prostate cancer.