Over 40 patients have entered the program, with the first cases showing a 50- to 100-fold rise in key antibodies, ex-Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told RT

More than 40 patients have now been selected for Russia's personalized cancer vaccine program, with the first treatments already producing a strong immune response, Russian Federal Medical-Biological Agency head and former Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told RT's Rick Sanchez on Wednesday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2026, Skvortsova said the treatment uses artificial intelligence as a key weapon against cancer.

The vaccine is custom-made for each patient in a process that takes around 42 days. Scientists take material from the person's tumor and blood, sequence the RNA, and use AI-driven predictive algorithms to compare the patient's genome with that of the tumor in order to identify unique mutations. Once those targets are found, the vaccine introduces peptides that teach the immune system to recognize the same markers on malignant cells and selectively kill them, while leaving healthy tissue intact.

"We use the immune system to kill malignant tumor cells," Skvortsova said. "It's one of the most powerful weapons."

Skvortsova stressed that AI does not work alone. Even after the most advanced artificial intelligence completes its analysis, bioinformaticians and geneticists manually validate the results. This is followed by another week of quality and accuracy testing.

The program is part of Russia's broader push into personalized immunotherapies, including the domestic cancer vaccines Neooncovac and Oncopept. Permission to begin clinical use was granted in March, and since then more than 40 patients have been selected, though they are at different stages of the process, from biopsy to vaccination.

The first two colorectal cancer patients began treatment around two months ago and have already received five injections. According to Skvortsova, the vaccine appears safe and well tolerated so far, and the concentration of G immunoglobulins in their tumors rose by 50 to 100 times. Doctors have also observed a decrease in lymph node size after the fourth injection, she said.

However, Skvortsova cautioned that it is too early to claim clinical effectiveness. The first major checkpoint will come after three months, when MRI scans will measure changes in lymph nodes and other metastatic sites.