After the success of the covid-19 vaccine, it is logical to wonder if it is possible to expect a similar triumph with cancer. It was already a goal to pursue before the pandemic.
Vaccines on demand against cancer.
When SARS-CoV-2 burst into our lives in 2020, vaccines based on messenger RNA (mRNA) were already the subject of various trials and publications, several of them aimed at using this technology in the fight against cancer. Preliminary results showed that there was room for hope, but there were still many things to improve and doubts associated with the use of a completely new technology.
Then the pandemic came and everything seemed to fade into the background. Cancer continued to be one of the great threats, but the saturation of the health system and the exceptional nature of the situation caused delays in diagnosis and treatment.
However, the strategy against covid-19 owes a lot to cancer research, and that is that without the previous years dedicated to researching mRNA vaccines, it would not have been possible to develop a version against SARS-CoV infection. -2 in such a short time (it takes between 10 and 15 years to develop a vaccine, but Pfizer and Moderna managed to prove the efficacy and safety of their proposal for covid-19 in less than a year). At the same time, the acceleration in development and its massive application are a fundamental source of information to resume, with much more data and at a more advanced point, the original purpose.
Why can this technology make a difference? In the case of contagious diseases, one of its main advantages is that they are not based on inoculating a virus (inactivated or part of it), which entails prior culture in the laboratory and a purification process. mRNA vaccines take advantage of our cellular machinery so that our own cells produce proteins identical to those carried by the virus on the surface, so that the immune system trains itself and learns to recognize them so that it is prepared in case of infection to occur.
To do this, it is necessary to sequence the viral RNA and locate the part that explains how to produce that protein in question, copy it and inoculate it in the body so that the cells do the job without posing a risk to the individual. RNA degrades very quickly and in no case does it affect our DNA, which remains protected in the nucleus of cells. And since you don’t inoculate a virus either, they are a safer option.