Will there be a cancer vaccine soon?

2023-11-13 08:45:00, Shëndeti CNA

mRNA technology has revolutionized medicine within a few years. During the corona pandemic, thanks to this technology, highly effective vaccines against the SARS-CoV2 pathogen were developed within a few months. Even if the virus develops further aggressive mutations, personalized vaccines can be developed again in a short time thanks to mRNA technology. But the technology that recently won the Nobel Prize in Medicine can do much more.

Will there be a cancer vaccine soon?

mRNA technology has given an entirely new impetus to anti-cancer research as well. The CEO of biotech company Curevac, Alexander Zehnder, wants to bring an mRNA-based cancer vaccine to market within five years at the latest.

If a vaccine was created against certain types of cancer, humanity's dream would come true. "Cancer vaccine research has been going on for 20 years. But the current progress is huge," says Zehnder. "We have gained a lot of experience during the pandemic, while artificial intelligence is now so good that it solves many problems in mRNA programming," explains the head of Curavac in an interview with Bild am Sonntag.

Cancer vaccinations stimulate the immune system so that the body's defense system specifically fights tumor cells. "The deadly thing about cancer is that it continues to grow. Cancer vaccination is supposed to stop the growth, even if the cancer has already metastasized. Cancer would then become a chronic disease that you can live with for decades. it will not be a death sentence", predicts Zehnder.

Race for the vaccine

In addition to Curevac, other companies are also intensively researching the discovery of a cancer vaccine. In early October 2023, the biotechnology company BioNTech published its very promising results so far from an ongoing clinical study. In this clinical study, the BioNTech mRNA cancer vaccine CARVac is already being tested for its effectiveness with test subjects.

The director of BioNTech, ?ahin, announced with optimism that, according to him, there will be vaccines against cancer in the coming years. "We believe that this will be possible on a larger scale for patients before 2030," said Ugur ?ahin in an interview with "Spiegel".

In the long term, cancer vaccines are intended to replace current conventional therapies. This would be a tremendous boon for patients because previous radiation or chemotherapy treatments are often extremely stressful and difficult for cancer patients.

"Chemotherapy or radiation therapy never just fights the tumor, but also the healthy tissue. That's why there are so many side effects," says Zehnder. "The advantage of using mRNA is that the immune system itself is stimulated and specifically fights only cancer and nothing else." How do cancer vaccines work?

T cells help the body fight infections by destroying diseased cells or stimulating other cells to attack them. But T cells have difficulty recognizing cancer cells. However, CAR T cells can do this.

CAR T-cell therapy has been allowed in Europe since 2018 and has so far been mainly used to treat leukemia, i.e. blood cancer. This highly effective form of immunotherapy is still unaffordable, because according to the German Cancer Research Center, manufacturers require up to 320,000 euros to produce immune cells for one patient.

In this cancer immunotherapy, the so-called T cells are filtered from the leukocytes, i.e. the white blood cells of the patient. T cells have been genetically modified to form chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) on their surface. This creates a receptor whose various components do not actually fit together.

Vaccines make tumor cells visible

If the CAR-T cells produced in this way are re-injected into the patient, they attach specifically to the cancer cell. The immune system is activated and attacks the tumor cells. Future vaccines may support this process if the CAR-T cells cannot find the tumor cell or are too weak to fight it effectively.

The protein Claudin-6, which is found almost exclusively in cancer, helps with this. Using mRNA technology, the genetic information of Claudin-6 is introduced into the tumor cell. This creates an antigen that attaches to the surface of the tumor cell. And this makes it easier for CAR-T cells to identify and find tumor cells.

So far, modified T cells only fight blood cancers. However, the rapid progress in mRNA technology gives hope that, in addition to leukemia, effective and easier therapies for other types of cancer will become possible in the future. Promising approaches include vaccines against skin cancer (melanoma), lung cancer, breast cancer and pancreatic cancer./ DW