Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines

The British government therefore signed two partnerships: one with Biontech to provide 10,000 patients by 2030 by 2030, and a 10-year investment in Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to create up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.

Great Britain opened clinical studies during pandemic within a few weeks. But before it used to take years to complete a clinical study. What has changed?

It was really fascinating, because for many years we believed that research is slow. In the past, it took 20 years to launch a medication. Unfortunately, most cancer patients will succumb to when a medication comes onto the market. We showed the world that it could happen in a year if you modernize your process, carry out parts of the process in parallel and use digital tools.

Of course, the opening of a clinical study during a pandemic is not necessarily the same as a clinical study against cancer. But they had a breakthrough for the cancer vaccine project at an early stage.

There was a study by Biontech, BNT122, to people with colon cancer with high risk, which did not very well recruit worldwide. When we announced the start pad of Cancer vaccine, the British Cancer community took this opportunity. We opened this attempt at Birmingham University Hospital, which was the most surprising for me because it is not a leading center for cancer vaccine studies.

We had to include 10,000 patients into the study and we arrived there within three months. It was pretty amazing. It only shows that because we are a single health system, we can do so much faster than any other country.

The domino fell very quickly onto the back of this success: we opened a head and neck cancer study in Liverpool, a study with esophageal and stomach cancer in Dundee and a lung cancer study in London. We began to create a community of people who all urged to start cancer vaccine attempts as soon as possible.

Several MRNA-based cancer vaccines are internationally in clinical studies in late stages and in Great Britain currently have 15 cancer vaccine studies. When will we see the first approved mRNA cancer vaccine?

We have a study to prevent skin cancer from coming back after cutting it out. It’s done now. We used it again, just like every one of the tests that we carried out, and the attempt ended a year before the schedule. This is completely unknown in cancer studies because they usually run over long.

What will happen now is that in the next six to twelve months we will monitor people in trying and find out whether there is a difference between the people who have adopted the cancer vaccine and those who have not done it. We hope to achieve results by the end of the year or early 2026. If it is successful, we invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine within just five years after the first licensed mRNA vaccine for covid. It’s pretty impressive.

Listen Lennard Lee Talk to Wired health on March 18 in Kings Place, London. Get tickets health.reded.com.