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The mRNA technology behind coronavirus vaccines is now being used to create bespoke vaccines for cancer patients.
"Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.
mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.
Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.
In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.
The UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics.
So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.
For many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.
We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.
What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive."
- Dr. Lennard Lee, UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-health-lennard-lee-cancer-vaccines/
That's not really accurate, Dr Jim Allison literally won a Nobel prize for it in 2018 after spending decades fighting against big pharma who said it won't work. He even cured his own cancer with it.
We've been doing comparative oncology for a long time studying this with dog and human patients as well. You can get experimental cancer vaccines for dogs and horses. I did it for my dog (it's not cheap), and it worked for a while but then the tumor outpaced his immune system. Lots of horses have been cured with Oncept. (both horses and dogs have very similar cancers to humans; mice do not)
COVID just made the mRNA tech way more affordable and the mRNA tech is the best way to make them
https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/conquest/immunotherapy-innovator-jim-allisons-nobel-purpose.h36-1592202.html
@feld @ned I've wondered if there was a threshold at which a tumor would outpace the immune system. Makes sense that that's a possibility.
"Cancer vaccine" is an interesting phrase, since usually vaccines are only effective in preventing a disease, not in treating one that's already active.
What's the probability that these custom tailored vaccines accidentally target a protein that's also common to healthy cells?
for the the specific tumor he studied, he discovered something called CTLA-4. Basically when your own antibodies would attempt to attach and attack the tumor cells there was this CTLA-4 that would reach back out and touch the antibody and shut off the attack. So your own immune system could never successfully attack the tumor.
His vaccine introduced new antibodies that didn't have that vulnerability so your immune system could eradicate the tumor cells no matter where they were in your body.
Pretty neat stuff!
For my dog, his mouth tumor was shrinking and then out of nowhere it exploded in growth. It really needed to be paired with some other treatment to inhibit growth but this was during COVID and they wouldn't offer targeted radiation therapy because COVID lockdowns. Really too bad, I think he could have beat it. The alternative was cutting off half his lower jaw to get a good enough margin but that's insanely cruel and I don't know why people do that to their pets. His lymph nodes were clear, it really hadn't spread... and then boom, took over his whole body in a matter of weeks after seeing some really promising results.
RIP Oliver, you were a good doggo
That would be incredible! Fuck cancer (and fuck covid, too).
@ned @SlicerDicer @feld really this approach should work for any infectious disease. And it should work to cure an active infection, not just in prevention.
@hyc @ned @SlicerDicer @feld
Simpler approaches suffice for most, and classical examples of where that doesn't work include Tetanus and Botulinus.
We can perfectly well generate an immune response to the Tetanus toxin, but it takes (several times IIRC) longer to make enough of it to avoid dying.
So we break the toxin a bit and start making antibodies to that toxoid ahead of exposure.
I suppose we could do it by MRNA-instructing our cells to make the relevant parts of the toxoid, but it works
@midgephoto @ned @SlicerDicer @feld well whatever happens, the US won't be taking part. https://mastodon.social/@AkaSci@fosstodon.org/114175555108255458
@hyc @ned @SlicerDicer @feld
Odd place, America.
RFK Jr is in their line of succession to act as president, about number 14 or so, but there's nobody apparently better above him. One of Trump's safety features.
@hyc @midgephoto @SlicerDicer @feld
Absolutely disgusting!