Vaccines for the world’s most deadly diseases, like cancer and heart disease, will likely be ready by 2030 and could save millions of lives, according to the top doctor at one the world’s leading drug companies.
The announcement is yet another sign of what many are calling “the golden age” of vaccine development, which is largely credited to the pandemic’s use of mRNA technology to create COVID-19 vaccines.
“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,” Moderna Chief Medical Officer Paul Burton, MD, PhD, told The Guardian. “It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studies in all of those areas, and they have all shown tremendous promise.”
“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology,” he said.
