In the 1970s, Hank Balfour, a virologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, was studying the long-term survival prospects of kidney transplant patients when he noticed that a small proportion of them went on to develop a rare form of cancer known as post-transplant proliferative disorder.
He was particularly intrigued when he discovered that almost all of these patients had been infected with a virus called Epstein-Barr or EBV, a curious pathogen that has captivated and puzzled virus-hunters for decades.
The main problem is that EBV infection is ubiquitous – most estimates suggest that the virus is inside 95% of the world’s population. And because EBV-related cancers are relatively rare – fewer than one in 300 cancer cases in the UK, and about 1.5% of cancers globally, are connected to the virus – modern medicine has largely taken the approach of pretending that the problem does not exist.
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After years of little progress, there are now three EBV vaccines in the pipeline. Moderna has turned its attention towards the virus, and is conducting phase 1 clinical trials of an mRNA vaccine for EBV at 15 centres across the US, while research teams at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Balfour’s own lab are working on their own jabs.
