Imagine visiting your doctor for a routine checkup, and on top of the usual shots — the annual flu or COVID vaccine—your doctor asks if you happen to’d prefer to be vaccinated for cancer. All cancer— lung, skin, colon, you name it — with only one mildly uncomfortable jab in the arm.
That scenario, which seems like something out of science fiction, is likely to be closer than you’re thinking that. And it’s mostly because of the COVID vaccine – which in a couple of short years has grow to be the highest-profile of the increasingly influential family often known as mRNA vaccines.
Indeed, mRNA vaccines designed to treat cancer (amongst other diseases) “are quite realistic,” says Anna Blakney, an RNA researcher at the University of British Columbia.
And cancer is just the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this month, scientists Edo Kon and and Dan Peer from Tel Aviv University and the Israel Institute for Biological Research announced that they’d created a single dose vaccine that could effectively protect people from Yersinia pestis bacterium. Haven’t heard of it? That’s since it’s higher known (not less than in the Middle Ages) as the plague — a disease that also kills hundreds in Asia and parts of Africa every year.
![Anna Blakney, an RNA researcher at the University of British Columbia, says we are currently in the midst of an](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008570205.jpg?w=681)
The plague may not be something that keeps you up at night, but there are likely loads of infectious diseases that do, and somewhere in the world, scientists are working (and getting amazingly close) to developing mRNA-based vaccines that could potentially make the disease you fear the most obsolete.
Blakney describes it as a RNAissance. ”Scientists are exploring the use of mRNA for many alternative applications,” she says, not only in treating cancer and COVID but “enzyme substitute therapies, immunotherapies, you name it.” These medicines “will probably be game changers in the years to come back,” she says.
It might seem to be these advances have arrived staggeringly fast, but researchers have been experimenting with mRNA treatments for many years. “Scientists first began studying mRNA vaccines in 1990,” says Blakney. “The primary RNA vaccine clinical trial was began in 2009.”
![Dan Peer, a scientist at Tel Aviv University, is part of a team that developed a new mRNA-based vaccine that could help prevent plague.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008576392.jpg?w=1024)
But then got here the pandemic, and its urgency meant “bureaucratic red tape was reduced,” says Keith Knutson, a professor of immunology at the Mayo Clinic who researches and develops cancer vaccines. “It resulted in critical re-evaluation of a few of the rules, regulations, and procedures that guide drug development.”
We’re not talking about the forms of regulatory mechanisms that protect the consumer from unsafe drugs, but rules around “how we get things done,” he says. “It forced us to do things higher and more efficiently.” Adds Knutson, a specialist in ovarian and breast cancer immunotherapies, “the pandemic pushed RNA from an emerging star to a superstar.”
![Although best known as a disease responsible for killing millions during the Middle Ages, plague still causes large number of deaths across the globe each year.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008571537.jpg?w=1024)
So how do mRNA vaccines work? Katalin Karikó, the Penn Medicine-scientist whose research laid the foundation for each the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines, calls it a “middleman between information and motion.” Unlike most vaccines, which inject a part of a virus into the patient, mRNA gives our cells instructions on easy methods to make the mandatory protein (or antibodies) to fight off infectious agents.
“The technology could potentially target any abnormal protein” that results in disease, says Lennard Lee, an oncologist at the University of Oxford. “We should always move forwards and push the boundaries.”
![Oxford University Professor Leonard Lee says mRNA-based vaccines could potentially target any disease-causing protein.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008616599.jpg)
Those boundaries are actually being pushed in almost every kind of deadly disease, from tuberculosis and malaria to high cholesterol and HIV. Promising advances are also being made for a universal flu vaccine, one which could protect against multiple strains of seasonal flu.
In the past, the effectiveness of flu vaccines varied from yr to yr — they were 39% effective in 2019-2020, but just 10% effective during the 2004-2005 flu season, in accordance with CDC data. But a latest vaccine being developed by University of Pennsylvania researchers “could include twenty strains of flu in a single mRNA vaccine,” says Blakney.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Several mRNA vaccines are in the works that may tackle every thing from ovarian, colorectal, lung and pancreatic cancers. Vaccines are even being developed for diseases that aren’t threatening humans — yet.
![Prof. Katalin Karikó from the University of Pennsylvania was part of the team whose mRNA research helped lead to covid vaccine development by Pfizer and Moderna.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008572690.jpg?w=1024)
Manufacturers like Moderna, GSK and CSL Seqirus are currently working on a precautionary measure vaccine, for a latest strain of avian flu called H5N1, which has killed tens of millions of animals (including mammals like foes, raccoons and bears) but stays very rare, and almost never deadly, amongst people. Not less than for now.
The massive one, after all, stays cancer. The truth is, years before COVID became public enemy primary, the primary focus of mRNA researchers was making a vaccine to treat cancer.
COVID was in some ways easier since it was more straightforward. “The protein target is evident and distinct from any of the proteins on a human cell,” explains Blakney. “For cancer vaccines, we’re targeting human cells that will or may not have completely distinct proteins, or the proteins could also be found on other tissues, so it’s necessary and sometimes difficult to ensure they’re very specific to only the cancer cells.”
![Dr. Nora Disis, director of the University of Washington’s Cancer Vaccine Institute, suggests diseases now considered](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008572059.jpg?w=1024)
In other words, with COVID, they were aiming for a transparent bullseye. For cancer, every target is different—“because every one’s cancers are different,” says Blakney—and the bullseye changes from patient to patient, and never looks quite the same.
But while cancer is a really different enemy than COVID, the lessons learned from the creation of COVID vaccines have served as a kind of canary in the coal mine for the entire arena of mRNA vaccine research. And the lighting speed wherein COVID vaccines were introduced could soon seem to be a turtle’s pace in comparison with what’s coming next.
Just last month, the FDA granted breakthrough therapy designation to a latest experimental vaccine for advanced stage melanoma, the results of a collaboration between pharmaceutical corporations Moderna and Merck. In clinical trials—which lasted for a yr and involved 157 patients—the risk of dying from cancer dropped by as much as 44%. Phase 3 trials, with a good larger group of cancer patients, is planned for this yr. A vaccine for skin cancer may not only grow to be a reality in our lifetimes, nevertheless it could be just around the corner.
![](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008571535.jpg?w=1024)
Knutson, the Mayo Clinic professor, can be currently overseeing five different clinical trials testing different vaccines for breast or ovarian cancer—vaccines that don’t just prevent cancer but additionally stop it from recurring. Although the data stays preliminary, he’s cautiously optimistic about their potential. Some treatments, he says, “are closer than others in becoming a reality.” And that’s mostly because cancer is so frustratingly diverse.
“Breast cancer for instance, is subdivided into smaller subtypes,” he says. “It’s different in some ways from lung cancer or ovarian cancer. All of them have different antigens.” In the event that they manage to search out the winning formula for a breast cancer vaccine, that doesn’t mean cancer patients all over the place should rejoice.
“A one-size-fits-all vaccine is probably going impossible,” Knutson says.
![At the vaulted Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, researchers are working on numerous vaccine clinical trials, including breast and ovarian cancer -- all rooted in mRNA technology.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008571525.jpg?w=1024)
But when we want more vaccines that target more cancers, that just means we now have to hurry up trials and proceed the pace that began with COVID, says Lee. And even greater than that, we want more cooperation like the type that helped advance the COVID vaccine so rapidly.
“Research requires hospitals to work together,” he says. This is strictly what’s happening in the U.K., with the January announcement of a Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, wherein the National Health Service has joined forces with BioNTech—the German firm that worked with Pfizer to fabricate the COVID vaccine—to fast-track cancer vaccines.
![The rapid-fire approval of covid vaccines by Pfizer and other pharmaceutical giants has led to a fast-tracking of subsequent mRNA-based medical preventions.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008571515.jpg?w=1024)
“It goals to rapidly discover large numbers of patients who could be eligible for cancer vaccine trials,” Lee says. “It is going to explore potential vaccines across multiple forms of cancer and could start as early as autumn 2023, with as much as 10,000 treatments being delivered.”
That’s an enormous difference from what Lee calls “old-school, pre-pandemic clinical trials,” which generally took a decade or more to finish. “The NHS-Galleri study [in 2022] recruited 140,000 to check a revolutionary latest blood test for cancer. This was achieved in lower than a yr,” Lee says. In the case of COVID, “the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine trials (of 2020) recruited 30,000 in lower than a yr. That is different from the hospital-by-hospital approach taken in the US.”
Ultimately, drugs enter the marketplace based on the speed of clinical trials, and Lee insists that it’s entirely in our control. “How many hospitals volunteer to run cancer vaccine trials, what number of doctors/nurses will support the studies and what number of patients will come forward?” he says. “I feel positive that there is robust grass-root support to get these latest products tested rapidly.”
![German firm BioNTech, Pfizer's partner on their Covid vaccine, is now part of the global Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, which is developing mRNA-based vaccines for cancers at a rapid pace.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008571514.jpg?w=1024)
Just over a yr ago, the BBC was wondering if mRNA vaccines could make us “superhuman.” We likely won’t get to that time, says Nora Disis, director of the University of Washington’s Cancer Vaccine Institute. But, she adds, “I don’t think we want ‘superhuman’ immunity, just good strong immunity.
There are vaccines being developed for opioid addiction, to forestall smoking, to treat Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, and plenty of others.” There’ll come a time, perhaps before expected, when many diseases which might be essentially a death sentence today “may be treated and prevented with vaccines,” Disis adds.
The important thing will probably be maintaining this momentum. “The pandemic took humanity to the brink and we needed to innovate to survive,” Lee says. “We were lucky and developed a tool that saved tens of tens of millions of lives. The one thing holding us back from using the same tool to save lots of many more is just . . . bravery.”
![](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000008571512.jpg?w=1024)
We should be brave enough to collectively leap again with more clinical trials into more diseases, he says. “The legacy of the pandemic is that we don’t say, ‘Let’s wait one other decade’ to finish research. We are saying, ‘Let’s act to hyper-accelerate this research field across the world.’ ”
After all, nobody knows obviously when — or even when — this may truly occur. But with the rapid pace of mRNA vaccines increasingly becoming the standard, we could thoroughly live to see a day after we roll up our sleeves for a cancer vaccine, and it becomes one less thing we now have to fret about.