The corona pandemic has resulted in an innovation boost in science. Due to the widespread use of mRNA vaccines, hopes are growing that a vaccine against cancer will be on the market in the foreseeable future. Pharmaceutical giant Moderna even wants to do this within the next seven years.
mRNA technology has long been regarded as an absolute hope for the future in cancer therapy – now a real race for the next medical revolution has broken out. After the pharmaceutical company Biontech entered into a partnership with the British health service, the American company Moderna is now also attacking.
The company’s chief medical officer, Paul Burton, has now promised the Guardian that the company is confident that mRNA technology could be used to treat various cancers, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune and other diseases by 2030. to deal with.
Stimulated immune system to destroy cancer cells
The aim of the technology is to stimulate the body or immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells. Multiple respiratory infections can also be covered with a single injection. This way you could also protect vulnerable people against Covid or flu at the same time.
The existing studies on the vaccines are “promising” – the success of the Covid vaccine has greatly accelerated progress in the new treatment method – researchers say progress from normally 15 years could be “unwound” in just 12 to 18 months. Appropriate therapy programs could begin in five years, it gives hope to many of those affected.
Rare diseases can be treated quickly?
“We will have that vaccine and it will be very effective and it will save many hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. I think we can offer personalized cancer vaccines against different types of tumors to people all over the world,” said Burton confidently.
The company wants to make rare diseases treatable with mRNA therapy, which until now often carried a death sentence. “I think in 10 years we’re approaching a world where you can really identify the genetic cause of a disease,” Burton said. It is then relatively easy to “remove and repair the cause with mRNA-based technology”.
Vaccine shows the immune system the way
The mRNA molecule instructs the cells to produce proteins. By injecting a synthetic form, cells can produce proteins that our immune system can attack. An mRNA-based cancer vaccine would alert the immune system to a cancer already growing in a patient’s body so it could attack and destroy it without destroying healthy cells.
This involves identifying protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are not present on healthy cells – and are most likely to trigger an immune response – and then generate bits of mRNA that instruct the body how to make them.
Algorithm filters out mutation
To do this, doctors first take genetic material from a patient and send it to a lab – where mutations are identified that are not present in healthy cells. A machine learning algorithm then determines which of these mutations are responsible for the cancer’s growth.
Then mRNAs for the most promising antigens are made and packaged in a personalized vaccine.
Source: Krone
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