A pharmaceutical company announced on Saturday that vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions could be ready by 2030, according to an article published by The Guardian.
Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, told the news outlet he is confident the firm will be able to offer such options for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.
“We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world,” Burton said.
He also said mRNA therapies could provide a solution for rare diseases for which there are currently no available therapies.
“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology,” added Burton.
Partially due to the pandemic
Burton credits the success of these new treatments partially to COVID-19.
“I think it was an order of magnitude, that the pandemic sped [this technology] up by. It has also allowed us to scale up manufacturing, so we’ve got extremely good at making large amounts of vaccine very quickly,” explained the scientist.
Other experts are in agreement with Burton.
“There has been a massive acceleration, not just of traditional vaccine technologies, but also novel ones that hadn’t previously been taken through licensure. Certainly, mRNA falls into that category, as does our vaccine,” said Dr Filip Dubovsky, president of research and development at Novavax,
“There’s no doubt there’s a lot more interest in vaccines. The really big question is, what happens from here?” said Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).
In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Moderna’s personalized cancer vaccine breakthrough therapy designation, meaning its regulatory review will be expedited.
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