UNITED STATES: A ground-breaking group of new vaccines for a variety of illnesses, including cancer, might save millions of lives, researchers have said. A major pharmaceutical company expressed confidence that vaccines for ailments including cancer, cardiovascular, and autoimmune diseases, as well as others, will be ready by 2030.
Studies on these vaccinations are also demonstrating “tremendous promise,” with some experts saying that 15 years’ worth of development has “unspooled” in just 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the COVID jab.
The chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical company Moderna, Dr Paul Burtont, said he believes the business will be able to provide such medicines for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.
The company, which developed a well-known coronavirus vaccine, is working on developing cancer vaccinations that specifically target certain tumour types.
“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 personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world,” said Burton.
He also stated that several respiratory infections could be treated by a single injection, allowing vulnerable people to be protected against COVID, the flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), while mRNA therapy might be available for rare diseases for which there are presently no medications. Treatments based on mRNA work by instructing cells how to produce a protein that starts the body’s defence mechanism against sickness.
Burton added that he thinks we would have mRNA-based treatments for rare diseases that were previously untreatable, and he thinks that ten years from now, we will be moving towards a world where we can truly identify the genetic cause of illness and—with relative simplicity—go, edit that out, and repair it employing mRNA-based technology.
Scientists caution, however, that if a high level of investment is not maintained, the fast progress—which has increased “by an order of magnitude” in the past three years—will be for nought.
The mRNA molecule gives instructions to cells on how to build proteins. Cells can pump out the proteins we want our immune system to attack by injecting them in a synthetic form. The immune system would be made aware of existing cancer via an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, allowing it to attack and eradicate it without harming healthy cells.
This entails locating protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are absent from healthy cells, because those are most likely to elicit an immune response, and then producing sections of mRNA that will educate the body on how to produce those protein fragments.
First, physicians take a biopsy of the patient’s tumour and send it to a lab for genetic sequencing to find mutations absent from healthy cells.
The mutation(s) fueling cancer’s growth is subsequently determined by a machine-learning system. It also gains knowledge of the regions of the aberrant proteins that these mutations encode that are most likely to elicit an immune response. The most promising antigens’ mRNAs are then produced and assembled into a customised vaccination.
Burton added that, based on what we’ve learned in recent months, if we ever thought mRNA was only for infectious illness or merely for COVID, the proof now is that that’s not the case.
“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, and rare diseases. We have studied in all of those areas, and they have all shown tremendous promise,” he continued.
In January, Moderna released data from a late-stage trial of its experimental mRNA vaccine for RSV. The data showed that the vaccine was 83.7% effective at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in people 60 and older. Based on these results, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called the vaccine a breakthrough medicine, which means that regulators can look at it more quickly.
Based on recent successes in patients with skin cancer melanoma, the FDA gave the same designation to Moderna’s tailored cancer vaccine in February.
Pfizer has also started looking for people to take part in a late-stage clinical study of an mRNA-based flu vaccine. The company is also working with BioNTech to look at other infectious diseases, such as shingles.
A Pfizer spokesperson stated that the lessons from the COVID-19 vaccine development process have shaped our overall approach to mRNA research and development, as well as how Pfizer performs R&D (research and development) more extensively.
“We gained a decade’s worth of scientific knowledge in just one year,” the spokesperson added.
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