Vaccines for cancers? It’s coming, and we’ll have COVID response-spurred mRNA vaccines to thank

Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.

…

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. …

[M]ost cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market [roughly 20 years]. We showed the world [through COVID response] that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.

…

We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. … If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive.

Share this article

XLinkedInFacebookRedditBlueskyThreadsSMSEmail

[su_panel color=”#3A3A3A” border=”1px solid #3A3A3A” radius=”2″ text_align=”left”]Editor’s Note: This excerpt is drawn from an interview with Lennard Lee[/su_panel]

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here