Cancer and Heart Disease Vaccines Will Become Reality in Five Years

by James DiGeorgia | 04/08/2023 12:52 PM

An internationally acclaimed biotechnology company that is known already for creating Covid-19 vaccines announced that it expects to bring to market a groundbreaking set of new vaccines that could save millions of lives for a range of conditions, including heart disease and cancer.

Moderna, Inc. (NasdaqGS: MRNA), a biotechnology company, discovers, develops, and commercializes messenger RNA therapeutics and vaccines for the treatment of infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, rare diseases, autoimmune, and cardiovascular diseases in the United States, Europe, and internationally. Says groundbreaking, it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions that could save millions of lives will be ready by 2030.

According to Moderna, Inc. (MRNA), its studies to develop these vaccinations have shown “tremendous promise”, with some researchers saying 15 years’ worth of progress has been “unspooled” in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab.

This is another confirmation that we at Wall Street Rebel are right about accelerating technologies, making the impossible possible by achieving leaps in technologies; what would have taken 100 years to achieve now taking 12 years and eventually taking two years, mirroring Moore’s Law that is currently applied to computer chips.

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Dr. Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.

Moderna, after developing a leading coronavirus vaccine, is now developing cancer vaccines that target different tumor types.

Dr. Burton, in a recent interview, said…

“We will have that vaccine, and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”

Burton also said that….

“Multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection – allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) – while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body’s immune response against disease.”

According to Burton…

“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology.”

Many scientists warn that this accelerated progress, which has surged “by order of magnitude” in the past three years, could be prevented if a high level of investment is not maintained.

Medical Researchers now understand that the mRNA molecule instructs cells to make proteins. By injecting a synthetic form, cells can pump out proteins we want our immune system to strike. An mRNA-based cancer vaccine would alert the immune system to cancer that is already growing in a patient’s body, so it can attack and destroy it without destroying healthy cells.

This involves identifying protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are not present in healthy cells – and which are most likely to trigger an immune response – and then creating pieces of mRNA that will instruct the body on how to manufacture them.

Here’s How it’s done!

First, doctors take a biopsy of a patient’s tumor and send it to a lab, where its genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations that aren’t present in healthy cells.

A machine learning algorithm then identifies which of these mutations is responsible for driving cancer’s growth. Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins these mutations encode are most likely to trigger an immune response. Then, mRNAs for the most promising antigens are manufactured and packaged into a personalized vaccine.

Burton says…

“I think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for Covid, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case.

“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studies in all of those areas, and they have all shown tremendous promise.”

In January, Moderna announced results from a late-stage trial of its experimental mRNA vaccine for RSV, suggesting it was 83.7% effective at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in adults aged 60 and older. Based on this data, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted the vaccine breakthrough therapy designation, meaning its regulatory review will be expedited.

In February, the FDA granted the same designation to Moderna’s personalized cancer vaccine, based on recent results in patients with the skin cancer melanoma.

Burton has been quoted as saying …

“I think it was an order of magnitude that the pandemic sped [this technology] up by. It has also allowed us to scale up manufacturing, so we’ve got extremely good at making large amounts of vaccine very quickly.”

Pfizer has also begun recruitment for a late-stage clinical trial of an mRNA-based influenza vaccine. It has its sights set on other infectious diseases, including shingles, in collaboration with BioNTech. A spokesperson for Pfizer said: “The learnings from the Covid-19 vaccine development process have informed our overall approach to mRNA research and development and how Pfizer conducts R&D (research and development) more broadly. We gained a decade’s worth of scientific knowledge in just one year.”

Other vaccine technologies have also benefited from the pandemic, including next-generation protein-based vaccines, such as the Covid jab made by US-based biotechnology company Novavax. The jab helps the immune system think it is encountering a virus and mounts a stronger response.

Dr. Filip Dubovsky, president of research and development at Novavax, has said...

“There has been a massive acceleration, not just of traditional vaccine technologies, but also novel ones that hadn’t previously been taken through licensure. Certainly, mRNA falls into that category, as does our vaccine.”

Dr Richard Hackett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (Cepi) said the biggest impact of the pandemic had been the shortening of development timelines for many previously unvalidated vaccine platforms.

Dr.Hacked was quoted as saying…

“It meant that things that might have unspooled over the next decade or even 15 years were compressed down into a year or a year and a half ….”

Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI), said: “There’s no doubt there’s a lot more interest in vaccines. The really big question is, what happens from here?”

With the looming threat of wider conflict in Europe, there is a risk that this focus on vaccines is lost without capitalizing on the momentum and technological insights that have been gained during the pandemic. Pollard, for one, believes this would be a mistake.

Dr. Pollard is quoted as saying….

“If you take a step back to think about what we are prepared to invest in during peacetime, like having a substantial military for most countries … Pandemics are as much a threat, if not more, than a military threat because we know they are going to happen as a certainty from where we are today. But we’re not investing even the amount that it would cost to build one nuclear submarine.”