A pharmaceutical company announced on Saturday that vaccines against cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and thus other conditions, could be ready by 2030.
Paul Burton, the chief physician of the pharmaceutical company Moderna, told the guardian that he is confident that the company will be able to offer such options for “all types of disease areas” in just five years.
“We will have this vaccine, 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 many different types of tumors to people around the world”, said Paul Burton.
The official also said that mRNA therapies can provide a solution for rare diseases for which there are currently no therapies available.
“I think we will mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that previously could not be fought, and I believe that in 10 years we will be approaching a world where you can truly identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit and repair it using mRNA-based technology,” he added.
Paul Burton believes that the success of these new treatments is due, in part, to covid-19.
“I think it was an order of magnitude that the pandemic accelerated (this technology). It also allowed us to increase the scale of manufacturing, so we are very good at making large quantities of vaccines very quickly”, explained the scientist.
Other experts agree.
“There has been a massive acceleration, not only of traditional vaccine technologies, but also of new technologies (…). Certainly, mRNA falls into that category, as does our vaccine,” said Filip Dubovsky, president of research and development at Novavax.
“There is no question that there is much more interest in vaccines. The big question is what happens from here,” said Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) UK.
In February, the US Food and Drug Administration granted Moderna the designation of personalized cancer vaccinewhich means that its regulatory review will be accelerated.
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