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Vaccines against cancer and heart disease could be ready by the end of the decade, according to Moderna’s chief executive.
Dr Paul Burton, said the advancements made in the field of mRNA — the technology used to make his company’s flagship Covid shot — have ushered in a golden era of vaccines.
He predicts that by 2030 there will be vaccines for ‘all sorts’ of incurable conditions, saving ‘hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.’
Early studies have already shown ‘tremendous promise’, he added. But they are not likely to be your typical vaccine — they will need to be highly personalized and expensive.
Heart disease and cancer are the biggest killers in the US, behind 1.3million fatalities annually — or more than one in three of all deaths recorded.
Dr Paul Burton, the chief executive of the vaccine maker, told The Guardian: ‘We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save 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: ‘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 be applied to all sorts of disease areas; We are in cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare diseases.
‘We have studies in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.’
Dr Burton did not say how the vaccines would work, but previous studies have shown how mRNA could be used to fight cancer.
MRNA vaccines work by instructing cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response against a specific pathogen, like Covid.
Scientists say these instructions can also be tweaked to get cells to make the antigens from the surface of cancer cells, alerting the immune system to cancer cells and triggering an attack.
To vaccinate someone against cancer, doctors would first take a biopsy from the person’s tumor.
They would then identify the antigen on the cancer cells and code the mRNA vaccine to trigger cells to make the same antigen.
The vaccine would then be administered to a patient, triggering their cells to make the antigen and sparking an immune response against it.
Immune cells would then be trained to destroy any cancer cells that remain in the body and to hunt out any cancer cells that return.
Doctors say mRNA vaccines could be tweaked for each patient to account for different cancer types and differences between patients. But this is likely to prove expensive.
Trials of mRNA cancer vaccines are already underway in the UK and the US, with results expected over the coming months.
They include Moderna’s own cancer vaccine, which was granted ‘breakthrough therapy’ status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February — paving the way for a fast-tracked approval.
The shot, given alongside an immunotherapy drug made by Merck, would be used to treat patients recovering from advanced melanoma who are most at risk of tumors returning.
