Moderna says it could have its cancer vaccine ready by "the end of the decade"

The company also wants to have its vaccines against cardiovascular diseases by 2030

MADRID, 12 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Moderna's chief medical officer, Paul Burton, has advanced that the company's personalized cancer vaccine, in combination with MSD's immunotherapy 'Keytruda' (pembrolizumab), could be ready by "the end of the decade".

"We will have that 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 offer personalized vaccines against multiple types of tumors to people around the world," Burton said in a statement to the British newspaper ' The Guardian'.

The expert has detailed how this mRNA-based vaccine works, which would alert the immune system to a cancer that is already growing in a patient's body so that it can attack and destroy it, without destroying healthy cells.

This is done by identifying protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are not present in healthy cells (and are more likely to trigger an immune response) and then creating mRNA fragments that will tell the body how to make them.

First, doctors take a biopsy of the patient's tumor and send it to the laboratory, where their genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations that are not present in healthy cells.

A machine learning algorithm then identifies which of these mutations are responsible for cancer growth. Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins these mutations code for are most likely to trigger an immune response. The mRNAs for the most promising antigens are then made and packaged into a personalized vaccine.

In February, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation to this Moderna cancer vaccine for patients with melanoma, with the goal of expediting its development and review.

The US decision came two months after Moderna presented the results of a phase 2 clinical trial showing that the vaccine, in combination with Keytruda, reduced melanoma recurrence by 44 percent.

Thus, the results of this study became the first demonstration of the efficacy of a cancer treatment that uses mRNA technology, used for the first time for vaccines against COVID-19.

Moderna and MSD plan to discuss these data with regulatory authorities and start a Phase 3 study in melanoma in 2023. They also plan to "rapidly" expand it to other tumor types.

In the interview with 'The Guardian', Moderna's medical director has also announced that the company hopes that its vaccines with mRNA technology will also be available by 2030 against cardiovascular, autoimmune or rare diseases, and also in a "very promising" way. .

"It can be applied to all kinds of diseases: cancer, infectious, cardiovascular, autoimmune and rare diseases. We have studies in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise," Burton said.

In this sense, the expert believes that a single vaccine could reach several respiratory infections, such as COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

In January, Moderna announced results from a late-stage trial of its experimental RSV vaccine, which found it to be 83.7 percent effective in preventing at least two symptoms, including cough and fever, in adults 60 and older. further. The United States also granted this vaccine breakthrough therapy designation.

Another field of action is rare diseases: "I believe that we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that could not be cured before, and I believe that within 10 years we will be close to a world in which the genetic cause can really be identified of a disease and relatively simply go edit and repair it using mRNA-based technology.