According to the medical director of the pharmaceutical company Moderna Paul Burton, messenger RNA vaccines against cancer and other diseases should be ready by the end of the decade, that is to say 2030.
- Cancer vaccines could be available by 2030.
- mRNA-based therapies could also be developed for rare diseases.
- The advances made in recent years are attributable to investments related to the development of the vaccine against Covid-19.
“I think we will be able to offer personalized vaccines against cancer and against several types of tumors, explained Paul Burton, the medical director of the pharmaceutical company Moderna in an interview with the Guardian, April 7, 2023. We will have this vaccine, it will be very effective and it will save several hundred thousand, if not millions, of lives.”
Vaccines against cancer and other diseases by 2030
Great promises that Paul Burton intends to keep by 2030. If this is the case, certain cancers could therefore be cured as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases or even several respiratory infections such as Covid-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
According to Paul Burton, thanks to the means and energy invested in the development of the vaccine against Covid-19, the laboratory has made significant progress in vaccines and therapies by messenger RNA or mRNA.
With conventional vaccination, a microbe or virus rendered harmless is introduced into the patient’s body so that his immune system learns to recognize it and put in place processes to neutralize it. The individual will thus be protected against future contamination, because he will have produced memory immune cells.
For the messenger RNA vaccine, proteins from the pathogen are injected. The result is that with the messenger RNA, the cells of the vaccinated individual will themselves produce the infectious agents against which they will have to fight. Then, the immune system will produce the necessary antibodies to fight against the microbe or the virus, and the memory cells will allow it to never be infected again.
Vaccines and mRNA therapies achieve good results
“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously untreatable, develops Paul Burton. I think 10 years from now we will be approaching a world where you can truly identify the genetic cause of a disease and, quite simply, you can modify and fix it using mRNA-based technology.”
The first results of a clinical trial for an mRNA vaccine against RSV are very promising: it is 83.7% effective in preventing at least two symptoms of RSV, such as cough and fever, in adults aged 60 years and older. The United States Medicines Agency (Food and Drug Administration, FDA) granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to this vaccine, which helps expedite regulatory review to bring it to market sooner.
“If you thought that mRNA was only for infectious diseases, or only for Covid, (…) it is absolutely not the case, continues Paul Burton. It can be applied to all kinds of pathological fields: cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, rare diseases. We are conducting studies in all of these areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.”
The FDA has also designated Moderna’s personalized cancer vaccine as a Breakthrough Therapy because it performed very well in clinical trials in patients with melanoma. Hopes for many patients.
In France, in 2018, there were 382,000 new cases of cancer And 18.1 million worldwide. That same year, there were 9.6 million deaths from this disease.