Moderna says vaccines for cancer and heart disease could be ready by 2030

A pharmaceutical company that has produced a leading Covid-19 vaccine has said vaccines against cancer as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases could be ready by 2030, potentially saving millions of lives.

Moderna’s chief medical officer Paul Burton believes the company will be able to offer vaccines for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.

Vaccine studies have shown “tremendous promise”, Dr Burton told Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, adding that his company is developing cancer vaccines that target different types of tumours.

“We will have this vaccine, and it will be very effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to bring personalized cancer vaccines against several different types of tumors to people around the world,” he said.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases and cancer are one of the leading causes of death worldwide.

An estimated 17.9 million people died from cardiovascular diseases in 2019, the WHO said, while cancer accounted for almost 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths.

Dr Burton also told the Guardian that multiple respiratory infections could be covered with a single injection.

This would allow vulnerable people to be protected against Covid-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus – a virus that causes mild cold-like symptoms.

Meanwhile, Dr Burton said messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) therapies may be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs.

“I think we’ll have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously untreatable, and I think 10 years from now we’ll be approaching a world where you can really identify the genetic cause of a disease. and, with relative simplicity, go modify and repair it using mRNA-based technology.

mRNA-based vaccines teach cells to make a protein to elicit an immune response.

Moderna and drugmaker Pfizer-BioNTech were the first to use the technology to create the mRNA vaccines used to fight Covid-19.

Dr Burton attributed progress in vaccines to progress in mRNA, with some experts saying 15 years of progress was now in the final stretch due to the rapid rollout of Covid-19 jabs.

“I think what we’ve learned over the past few months is that if you ever thought mRNA was only for infectious diseases, or only for Covid-19, the evidence now is that it’s absolutely not. not the case,” said The Guardian.

“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, rare diseases. We have studies in all of these areas, and they have all shown tremendous promise. »