How mRNA technology could change the world – HotAir

Then there is cancer. Scientists may never design a single cancer vaccine because cancer is not a single disease but a constellation of over 100 diseases, which we generally refer to for the place on the body where they originate from. But what if we could respond to these hundreds of cancers with our own constellation of therapies that could cause the body to attack a specific tumor?

This is the idea behind BioNTech’s cancer immunotherapy research. It works roughly like this: For every cancer patient, BioNTech takes a tissue sample from a tumor for genetic analysis. Based on this test, the company designs a personalized mRNA vaccine, which instructs the patient’s cells to produce proteins associated with the specific mutation of that specific tumor. The immune system learns to find and destroy similar tumor cells throughout the body.

This round of analysis and design is not that different from how BioNTech and Moderna quickly analyzed Chinese scientists for SARS-CoV-2 sequencing, identified the spike protein for the attack, and made it out of it. effective therapy. “We hope that everything we have learned from COVID about the production and manufacture of mRNA can fertilize the work on our standard cancer treatments,” Özlem Türeci of BioNTech told me. The company is currently conducting clinical trials for personalized vaccines against “virtually all solid cancers,” she said, including melanoma, breast cancer and ovarian cancer. A 2021 analysis by University of North Carolina researchers in the journal Molecular Cancer pointed out that these cancer treatments have been slow to develop in recent years, but the breakthrough of COVID-19 has coincided. with “promising” clinical trials in cancer vaccines. “We envision the rapid progress of mRNA vaccines for cancer immunotherapy in the near future,” they concluded.