BioNTech scientists say custom vaccines for cancer patients will be here soon; others disagree

Vaccines customized for individual cancer patients may be on the way, according to the founders of BioNTech.

In an interview with BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, co-founder Dr. Özlem Türeci, said that a cure for cancer is “in our grasp.” Her husband, Dr. Uğur Şahin, added they could be available “before 2030.”

But not everyone is convinced.

“I’m very hesitant to give a promissory note,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, the former Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society told Matt Galloway on The Current.

Brawley, who’s currently a professor of oncology and epidemiology at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, said claims of cancer vaccinations on the horizon are nothing new.

“Our history in oncology over the last 70 years is we’ve literally had leaders in the profession saying there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

WATCH: The possibilities of mRNA vaccines beyond COVID-19

The possibilities of mRNA vaccines beyond COVID-19

The ground-breaking technology used to create the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, mRNA, could also be used to produce vaccines for other diseases including HIV, the flu and even cancer.

But Kelly McNagny, medical genetics and biomedical engineering professor at the University of British Columbia, said BioNTech’s cancer vaccine potential is “actually really promising” — and could work for many different types of cancer.

“This is a treatment for patients with cancer,” he told Galloway. “So it’s not that vaccine that you would think of getting your a shot in your arm and you’re never going to see cancer.”

He said the process would involve sequencing a patient’s tumour, picking out proteins that are most likely to stimulate an immune response, making mRNAs out of those proteins and jabbing them into arms in the hopes of activating the patient’s T cells.

“Once you get good activation of T cells to a tumor protein, they start killing the tumor,” he said.

Still, people should remain “a little skeptical.”

“Don’t envision 10 years from now, everybody walks in and gets their cancer treated immediately and they’re cured,” he said.

“What you will see, though, is this technology being used to treat specific cancers, and that’s going to start the wave. So that’s what I would say is a realistic expectation.”

cancer prevention

Although Brawley is hopeful for cancer vaccines, he feels cancer prevention hasn’t been explored to its fullest potential.

“The death rate from cancer in 1900 was one-third what the death rate from cancer by 2000,” he said. “The increase over that 100 years really tells us that we started doing something to cause cancer deaths.”

“We need to figure out what those things are — and actually, we have — and then start removing those things that caused that tripling of the cancer death.”

Our way of life is carcinogenic.-Dr. Otis Brawley

According to Brawley, 42 percent of all cancers in the United States are due to an “identifiable cause.”

These include smoking, which Brawley said causes at least 18 different cancers — yet, 22.3 percent of the global population still used tobacco in 2020, according to the World Health Organization.

In Canada, nearly 15 percent of people age 12 or older smoked cigarettes either daily or occasionally in 2019.

Another severe but overlooked cause of cancer, according to Brawley, is what he calls “energy imbalance.”

“It’s not just obesity. It’s consuming too many calories, not exercising enough, and then storing those calories,” he said. “[It’s] the second leading cause of cancer, and by the end of this decade, will be the leading cause of cancer in the United States.”

But Brawley said that people don’t see overeating and smoking as emergent issues having to do with cancer — and he questions whether people have the willpower to change their habits and lower their risk of cancer.

“The way that we live, especially over the last 50 years … we got rid of sidewalks, we stopped walking, stopped getting exercise,” he said. “We bought these big SUVS … load them up with calorie-dense, processed foods.”

“Our way of life is carcinogenic.”

Invest in science

Beyond what BioNTech is doing, Brawley sees some “very exciting” research being done in cancer treatment.

“In clinical trials so far, we’ve been able to create a situation where a pancreatic cancer, which normally doesn’t express antigens, expresses antigens, and then we can unleash the immune system on that pancreatic cancer,” he said.

But Brawley said science is currently “conducting itself with one arm tied behind its back” due to a lack of funds.

“Here in the United States, the National Cancer Institute is literally funding nine per cent of the grants submitted to it that it says are worth funding,” he said.

“We have investigators who don’t want to collaborate with each other because they’re in a competition for that nine per cent of the money.”

This might be the key that determines how soon a cancer vaccine comes into existence, according to Brawley.

“As long as we’re willing to invest in the science, we will get vaccine technology that will be useful for both prevention as well as for therapy.”

Produced by Amanda Grant.