The first messenger RNA cancer vaccines could be ready as early as 2030 : this was announced to the news agencies by Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin , the co-founders of the biopharmaceutical company BioNTech , which used mRna technology with Pfizer to make the vaccine anti Covid.
The two researchers are today at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for the award ceremony of the Feltrinelli 2023 international prize for medicine.
"If the trials underway give positive results and confirm the efficacy of mRna vaccines also for cancer, the first treatments could arrive between 2030 and 2040 ," say the two researchers.
But Covid and tumors are not the only possible applications for this type of messenger RNA-based vaccine, which contains instructions for producing a certain viral protein (in the case of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the Spike protein), in order to stimulate the immune system to recognize it and fight it.
«We are also expanding the trials to other diseases - confirm Türeci and Sahin - such as malaria and tuberculosis . It is important to carefully carry out all phases of clinical trials because they allow us to collect a large amount of data ».
The two researchers explain why mRna vaccines used against viruses can also be effective in the fight against tumors: "In both cases, there is a dysfunction of the immune system at the base, therefore the mechanism is similar and we can exploit this characteristic to our advantage, since these vaccines are very efficient in instructing immune cells ».
In fact, while mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 stimulate our immune response to protect us from the virus, a similar vaccine for tumors stimulates the patients' immune system to attack tumor cells, targeting the new proteins that form later to mutations in the DNA.
These proteins, however, are a kind of "personal signature" in each patient and for this reason defeating them with a universal vaccine represents a real challenge.
(Unioneonline/vl)