Cancer Vaccines Are Suddenly Looking Extremely Promising

With the help of mRNA technology proven effective during the COVID pandemic, researchers are now closer than ever to creating viable cancer vaccines.

In an interview with Wired, Lennard Lee, an oncologist with the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) working on mRNA cancer vaccines, says he believes the groundbreaking research may prove to be a "silver lining" in the brutal COVID-19 pandemic.

Before COVID, as Lee told the magazine, "cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research."

"Pretty much every clinical trial had failed," the NHS oncologist said. "With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible."

As with mRNA COVID vaccines, the logistics of these potential new cancer inoculations work by "giving the body instructions" to fight troublesome cells, as Lee detailed, ultimately providing the immune system with a how-to manual on fighting cancer.

"Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward," he told Wired. "Same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient."

Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach taken with the widespread usage of mRNA COVID jabs, however, these new cancer vaccines will be personalized for each individual cancer patient.

"In the current trials," Lee elucidated, "we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer."

"That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else," he recounted to the magazine. "It’s like science fiction."

According to Lee, breakthrough cancer vaccine innovation came on the heels of the UK's rapid infrastructure-building during the COVID pandemic, which saw the country "open and deliver clinical trials" much faster than anyone would have expected.

As COVID began winding down in 2022, Lee and his colleagues set up the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, a post-pandemic pet project that segued mRNA research into the arena of oncology. Not long after, "the dominoes started falling very quickly" as that project and others around the world rapidly progressed towards cancer vaccines. One NHS trial seeking to stop skin cancer from coming back was completed a year early — something that's "completely unheard of," Lee said.

The NHS oncologist told Wired that the results from that trial should come out by the end of this year or the beginning of 2026. If it was successful, Lee told Wired, he and his team "will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine — an impressive feat indeed, especially this soon after the technology was deployed at scale during the pandemic.

More on the cancer vax: Groundbreaking Ovarian Cancer Vaccine at an "Exciting" Moment, Lead Scientist Says

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