A VACCINE FOR CANCER

The pandemic derailed a lot of medical research. But the effort that was suddenly redirected towards developing a vaccine for COVID-19 may have helped us make important progress on at least one breakthrough: preventing cancer

- DR HELEN PILCHER

In December 2019, Dr Vinod Balachandran and his team had just recruited the first patients for an exciting clinical trial that was happening in New York. It was to test a new type of vaccine for pancreatic cancer. The vaccine, made from a molecule called messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), was designed to prime the patients’ immune systems to attack their cancer cells, but before the trial could get into full swing, disaster struck. A novel virus, discovered in China, was silently spreading around the globe. Three months later, New York was in lockdown.

With a lot of routine cancer treatment paused, trial participants were understandably nervous. “Patients didn’t want to travel to New York,” says Balachandran, who is based in the city’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Then there were logistical issues. Biopsy samples taken from the participants had to be sent to a biotech company in Germany for analysis, and the vaccine, which was then tailor-made for each patient, had to be promptly sent back. With many routine flights grounded, it seemed like a tall order, but perhaps the biggest hurdle facing the trial was the fact that the German biotech company they were working with, BioNTech, now found itself embroiled in a race to produce the world’s first vaccine for COVID-19.

In the year that followed, BioNTech collaborated with another company, Pfizer, to produce more than 20 candidate COVID-19 vaccines, all made from mRNA, including the one that went on to be given to hundreds of millions of people. It’s fair to say that 2020 was a busy year for BioNTech, so you’d be forgiven for presuming that the trial for the cancer vaccines fell by the wayside, but that wasn’t the case.