Abstract: Background: Bladder cancer is rare in young women, and advanced presentations are exceptionally uncommon. We report a de-identifie
Abstract:
Background: Bladder cancer is rare in young women, and advanced presentations are exceptionally uncommon. We report a de-identified case of a previously healthy 31-year-old female who developed rapidly progressive stage IV bladder cancer within 12 months of completing a three-dose Moderna mRNA vaccination series (May 2021, June 2021, December 2021).
Case Findings: Comprehensive multi-omic profiling was performed using PBIMA (Molecular Surveillance and Individualized Targeted Immunotherapy Peptide Editing) and REViSS (Spike-associated Transcriptional/Translational Instability Surveillance), incorporating analyses of plasma-derived circulating tumor DNA, whole-blood RNA, and urine exosome proteomics. Dysregulated gene expressions were identified across oncogenic driver genes (KRAS, ATM, MAPK1, NRAS, CHD4, PIK3CA, and SF3B1), auxiliary tumor-promoting signals (TOP1, PSIP1, and ERBB2), and broad evidence of genome instability with impaired DNA repair (ATM, MSH2). Within circulating tumor DNA, a host–vector chimeric read mapped to chr19:55,482,637–55,482,674 (GRCh38), in cytoband 19q13.42, positioned ~367 kb downstream of the canonical AAVS1 safe harbor and ~158 kb upstream of ZNF580 at the proximal edge of the zinc-finger (ZNF) gene cluster. This sequence aligned with perfect 20/20 bp identity to a segment (bases 5905–5924) within the Spike open reading frame (ORF) coding region (bases 3674–7480) of the Pfizer BNT162b2 DNA plasmid reference (GenBank accession OR134577.1), despite the patient only receiving Moderna vaccinations. This apparent paradox is best explained by shared Spike ORF sequences within the expression cassette across both vaccine platforms; because Moderna’s proprietary plasmid sequence has not been deposited in NCBI, BLAST defaults to Pfizer’s published reference as the nearest available match. The integration site was located outside the canonical AAVS1 “safe harbor” and within a gene-dense, recombination-prone regulatory region, raising concern for transcriptional disruption, fusion transcript formation, and oncogenic potential. The probability of a random 20-base sequence perfectly matching a predefined target is approximately 1 in a trillion, making this alignment statistically compelling and highly unlikely to be an incidental artifact.
Conclusions: This sentinel case report provides the first documented evidence of genomic integration of mRNA vaccine-derived genetic material in a human subject, documenting a temporal association between COVID-19 mRNA vaccination and aggressive malignancy, reproducible multi-omic evidence of oncogenic signaling, and a non–safe harbor host–vector integration event. While causality cannot be established from a single case, the convergence of (i) close temporal proximity to vaccination, (ii) genomic integration of a vaccine plasmid–derived spike gene fragment, and (iii) consistent transcriptomic and proteomic instability across biospecimens represents a highly unusual and biologically plausible pattern. These findings highlight an urgent need for systematic genomic surveillance, orthogonal validation with long-read sequencing, and larger cohort studies to rigorously define the impact of synthetic mRNA vaccine platforms on genome integrity and cancer risk.
