A personalised cancer vaccine given alongside a widely used immunotherapy drug can cut the risk of patients dying or skin cancer returning by 42 per cent in what has been hailed a “major breakthrough”.

The phase three trial of the mRNA jab coupled with immunotherapy, which tracked more than 1,100 patients, found it reduced the risk of melanoma — the most aggressive form of skin cancer causing about 2,600 deaths a year in the UK — spreading by 38 per cent over two years compared to the use of immunotherapy alone.

Normally, only around a third of patients with the worst form of the disease live for five years after diagnosis.

The success has been celebrated as the start of a new era for personalised cancer vaccines and drug manufacturers MSD and Moderna said the combined approach was now being tested on other types of cancers, including kidney, bladder and lung.

Professor Pippa Corrie, a consultant medical oncologist, helped run part of the study with patients at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge…