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cancer vaccine available by 2030?

imagine a world without cancer. is it possible?

by rick richardson
technology this week

a ground-breaking group of new vaccines for a variety of illnesses, including cancer, might save millions of lives, according to researchers. a major pharmaceutical company expressed confidence that vaccines for ailments including cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, as well as others, will be available by the end of this decade.

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studies into these vaccinations are also “very promising,” according to some researchers, who claim that the covid-19 jab’s success has “unspooled” 15 years’ worth of development in just 12 to 18 months.

in as little as five years, according to dr. paul burton, chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical company moderna, the company will be able to provide such medicines for “all sorts of illness areas.”

moderna, which developed a well-known coronavirus vaccine, is working on producing cancer vaccinations that specifically target certain tumor types.

burton said: “we will have that vaccine, and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. i think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”

he added that mrna therapy might be available for uncommon diseases for which there are presently no medications, allowing vulnerable people to be protected against covidio, the flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (rsv) with just one injection. mrna-based treatments function by instructing cells to produce a protein that starts the body’s immunological response to sickness.

burton said, “i think we will have mrna-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and i think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, edit that out and repair it using mrna-based technology.”

scientists caution that if a high level of investment is not maintained, the fast progress, which has increased “by an order of magnitude” in the last three years, will be for naught.

our cells can pump out the proteins we want our immune system to attack by injecting them with a synthetic form. the immune system would be made aware of an existing cancer via an mrna-based cancer vaccine, allowing it to attack and eradicate it without harming healthy cells.

by first identifying the protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are absent from healthy cells and are most likely to elicit an immune response, bits of mrna that will educate the body on how to produce those protein fragments can then be created.

to find mutations that don’t exist in healthy cells, doctors first take a biopsy of a patient’s tumor and submit it to a lab for genetic sequencing.

the mutation(s) fueling the cancer’s growth are subsequently determined by a machine learning system. it also gains knowledge of the regions of the aberrant proteins these mutations encode that are most likely to elicit an immunological response. the most promising antigens’ mrnas are then produced and assembled into a customized vaccination.

burton said, “i think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mrna was just for infectious diseases, or just for covid, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case.”

“it can apply to many disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. we have studies in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.”

the experimental mrna vaccine for rsv was 83.7 percent efficient at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in adults 60 and older, according to results from a late-stage trial published in january by moderna. the u.s. food and drug administration (fda) designated the vaccine as a breakthrough medicine based on this information, which expedites the regulatory review process.

based on recent outcomes in patients with the skin cancer melanoma, the fda gave moderna’s personalized cancer vaccine the same classification in february.

burton said, “i think it was an order of magnitude that the pandemic sped [this technology] up by. it has also allowed us to scale up manufacturing, so we’ve gotten extremely good at making large amounts of vaccine very quickly.”

moderna is not alone in its interest in mrna technology. pfizer has also begun recruitment for a late-stage clinical trial of an mrna-based influenza vaccine, and has its sights set on other infectious diseases, including shingles, in collaboration with biontech. a spokesperson for pfizer said, “the learnings from the covid-19 vaccine development process have informed our overall approach to mrna research and development, and how pfizer conducts r&d (research and development) more broadly. we gained a decade’s worth of scientific knowledge in just one year.”

the major effect of the pandemic, according to dr. richard hackett, ceo of the coalition for epidemic preparedness and innovations (cepi), has been the acceleration of the creation of many as-yet-unvalidated vaccine platforms. “it meant that events that might have unfolded over the following 10 or even 15 years were condensed into a year or a year and a half,” he said.

there is a real need to keep the level of research and development investment high. prof andrew pollard, director of the oxford vaccine group and chair of the uk’s joint committee on vaccination and immunization (jcvi) said, “if you take a step back to think about what we are prepared to invest in during peacetime, like having a substantial military for most countries. pandemics are as much a threat, if not more, than a military threat, because we know they are going to happen as a certainty from where we are today. but we’re not investing even the amount that it would cost to build one nuclear submarine.”