Ahead of Schedule

FAST TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS COULD DELIVER VACCINES FOR CANCER AND OTHER DISEASES BY THE END OF THE DECADE

- DAMIEN MARTIN

Thanks to the breakthroughs of mRNA technology in creating COVID-19 vaccines, the method is being put to the test for other diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia. And the fast rollout necessitated by a global pandemic has compressed 10 or 15 years of progress into a brief period. Developers at Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech are optimistic they can create effective vaccines for cardiovascular, autoimmune, and several respiratory diseases and individual cancers. They might even be able to develop vaccines for diseases that have so far resisted treatment.

CANCER VACCINES

The nature of mRNA-based vaccines makes them more effective than previous vaccines because they teach human cells to make proteins they don’t naturally make. In the case of a potential mRNA cancer vaccine, that means immune systems could recognize proteins on cancer cells and then attack those cells while leaving healthy ones alone.

“We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives,” Moderna chief medical officer Dr. Paul Burton told the Guardian. “I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”