Cancer vaccine could be ready by 2030, say founders of COVID vaccine maker BioNTech

LONDON– The world could be just a few years away from a cancer vaccine, according to the couple behind the Pfizer/BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine.

“We believe that a cure for cancer or a change in the lives of cancer patients is within our reach,” Professor Ozlem Tureci said in an interview with BBC News over the weekend. Her husband, Professor Ugur Sahin, with whom she co-founded German pharmaceutical company BioNTech, said he believed cancer vaccines could be widely available “before 2030”.

The husband and wife couple founded BioNTech in 2008, originally to develop and manufacture treatments for individualized cancer immunotherapy using mRNA technology. But when the pandemic hit, they adapted this technology to create one of the first and most effective COVID-19 vaccines.

Scientists have been working on a cancer vaccine for decades. One approach is to teach the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells – ideally preventing cancer from growing in the first place. In addition, there are other types of vaccines to treat people who already have cancer, including an FDA-approved cancer vaccine for people with advanced prostate cancer.

“From the beginning, our focus has been on utilizing the full potential of the body’s immune system to successfully fight cancer and infectious diseases,” the company’s website states.

In this recent interview, the two professors explained that their experience in developing the COVID vaccine could help accelerate their work on a cancer vaccine as it brought mRNA technology into the mainstream.

“What we developed for cancer vaccine development over decades was the tailwind for COVID-19 vaccine development, and now the Covid-19 vaccine and our experience in its development are flowing back into our cancer work,” Tureci said explained, “mRNA acts as a blueprint and allows you to tell the body to produce the drug or vaccine… and if you’re using mRNA as a vaccine, the mRNA is a blueprint for the enemy’s ‘wanted poster’ – in this one.” Case , cancer antigens that distinguish cancer cells from normal cells.”

“The development of multiple COVID vaccines in record time has demonstrated the potential of mRNA vaccine technology, which could one day become an effective treatment to fight cancer,” said Dr. Sam Godfrey, Research Information Manager at Cancer Research UK.

“Just as science was our way out of the pandemic, science is our way to fight cancer. We are optimistic that in the future we will see mRNA technology and other exciting vaccine approaches that will offer physicians more treatment options to fight cancer. ‘ added Godfrey.

Many other pharmaceutical companies, including vaccine maker Moderna, are also working on mRNA vaccines to fight certain types of cancer.

“The use of vaccines to treat cancer is an exciting emerging area,” Godfrey said. “We’ve already partnered with Vaccitech to test one of the world’s first therapeutic lung cancer vaccines, and we’re funding cutting-edge research to find out how virus and vaccine technology could activate the immune system against cancer.”

This approach is not without its obstacles. For example, the BioNTech vaccine has to be developed individually for each person. However, a preliminary study of pancreatic cancer suggested the vaccine could help delay cancer recurrence, although more research is needed.

“Every step, every patient that we treat in our cancer trials helps us to find out more about what we are against and how to deal with it,” Tureci said, before adding a warning: “We are always hesitant to say that we Doing this will be a cure for cancer. We have a number of breakthroughs and we will continue to work on them.”