Experts confirmed that they are confident that the production of a vaccine to treat cancer will be ready by 2030, and that it will be able to save millions of lives.
The British newspaper “The Guardian” quoted the chief medical officer of Moderna, Dr. Paul Burton, as saying that he believes that a vaccine targeting different types of malignant tumors will be ready by the end of the current decade.
"We're going to have this very effective vaccine, and it's going to save millions of lives," Burton added.
He explained that "multiple respiratory infections can be covered with one injection, which allows people at risk to be protected from Covid virus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus."
He added, “We will have mRNA-based treatments for rare, previously insurmountable diseases. I think 10 years from now, we will be close to a world where you can identify the genetic cause of disease, and then we just have to fix that using mRNA-based technology.”
According to Sky News Arabia, the messenger RNA directs the cells to make proteins, by injecting an artificial form, the cells can pump out the proteins that the human immune system is intended to hit.
An RNA-based cancer vaccine alerts the immune system to the presence of cancer already growing in the patient's body, so that it can attack and destroy it, without destroying healthy cells.
This involves identifying the parts of a protein on the surface of cancer cells that are not found in healthy cells that are most likely to trigger an immune response, and then creating pieces of messenger RNA that will tell the body how to make them.
Doctors take a biopsy from a patient's tumor and send it to a lab, where the genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations not found in healthy cells.
While a machine learning algorithm determines which of these mutations are responsible for driving the growth of the cancer.
Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins made up by these mutations are most likely to trigger an immune response.
Next, the RNA of most of the promising antigens is synthesized and packaged as a 'personalised' vaccine.
Okaz (London) @OKAZ_online