Experts at the drug company Moderna said they are confident that a vaccine to treat cancer will be ready by 2030.
The British newspaper “The Guardian” quoted the chief medical officer of Moderna, Dr. Paul Burton, as saying that he believes that a vaccine targeting different types of malignant tumors will be ready by the end of the current decade.
“We’re going to have this very effective vaccine, and it’s going to save millions of lives,” Burton added.
He explained that “multiple respiratory infections can be covered with one injection, which allows people at risk to be protected from the Covid virus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.”
He added, “We will have mRNA-based treatments for rare, previously insurmountable diseases. I think 10 years from now, we will be close to a world where you can identify the genetic cause of disease, and then we just have to fix that using mRNA-based technology.”
How will a revolutionary vaccine work?
The messenger RNA molecule directs cells to make proteins. By injecting a synthetic form, the cells can pump out proteins that are meant to be hit by the human immune system.
An RNA-based cancer vaccine alerts the immune system to the presence of cancer already growing in the patient’s body, so that it can attack and destroy it, without destroying healthy cells.
This involves identifying the parts of a protein on the surface of cancer cells that are not found in healthy cells that are most likely to trigger an immune response, and then creating pieces of messenger RNA that will tell the body how to make them.
Doctors take a biopsy from a patient’s tumor and send it to a lab, where the genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations not found in healthy cells.
A machine learning algorithm determines which of these mutations are responsible for driving cancer growth.
Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins encode by these mutations are most likely to trigger an immune response.