Couple behind Pfizer/BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine states that cancer vaccine may be available just a few years away.
In an interview with BBC, professor Ozlem Tureci said:
“We feel that a cure for cancer or to changing cancer patients’ lives is in our grasp,”
Her husband, professor Ugur Sahin, with whom she co-founded the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech expressed his optimism that widespread access to cancer vaccines could be possible “before 2030”.
The wife-husband duo developed BioNtech after they saw an opportunity in the emerging field of mRNA technology for the creation of personalised cancer immunotherapies.
However, when the pandemic hit, they repurposed this technology to develop the first and most potent vaccination against the COVID-19.
For your information, for many years, medical professionals have tried to develop a vaccination against cancer. Interestingly, our body can avoid cancer if the immune system trains to identify and eliminate cancer cells.
There are also other kinds of vaccines that are meant to treat people who already have cancer. For instance, prostate cancer.
mRNA technology
In the recent interview, the two professors discussed how the widespread adoption of mRNA technology. It pioneered by the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, that could speed up their work on cancer vaccine.
“What we have developed over decades for cancer vaccine development has been the tailwind for developing the COVID-19 vaccine, and now the Covid-19 vaccine and our experience in developing it gives back to our cancer work,” Tureci said, explaining that “mRNA acts as a blueprint and allows you to tell the body to produce the drug or the vaccine … and when you use mRNA as a vaccine, the mRNA is a blueprint for the ‘wanted poster’ of the enemy — in this case, cancer antigens which distinguish cancer cells from normal cells.”
In addition to that, other pharmaceutical companies, such as the manufacturer of vaccines Moderna, are developing mRNA vaccines to target certain cancers.
Source: abc NEWS