mRNA vaccines for every imaginable disease. Who’s in?

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Imagine visiting your doctor for a routine checkup, and on top of the usual shots — the annual flu or COVID vaccine—your doctor asks if you’d like to be vaccinated for cancer. All cancer— lung, skin, colon, you name it — with just one mildly uncomfortable jab in the arm. That scenario, which sounds like something out of science fiction, might be closer than you think. And it’s mostly thanks to the COVID vaccine – which in a few short years has become the highest-profile of the increasingly influential family known as mRNA vaccines.  Indeed, mRNA vaccines designed to treat cancer (among other diseases) “are quite realistic,” says Anna Blakney, an RNA researcher at the University of British Columbia. Blakney describes it as a RNAissance. ”Scientists are exploring the use of mRNA for many different applications,” she says, not just in treating cancer and COVID but “enzyme replacement therapies, immunotherapies, you name it.” These medicines “will be game changers in the years to come,” she says. But then came the pandemic, and its urgency meant “bureaucratic red tape was reduced,” says Keith Knutson, a professor of immunology at the Mayo Clinic who researches and develops cancer vaccines. “It resulted in critical re-evaluation of some of the rules, regulations, and procedures that guide drug development.” Unlike most vaccines, which inject part of a virus into the patient, mRNA gives our cells instructions on how to make the necessary protein (or antibodies) to fight off infectious agents. The technology could potentially target any abnormal protein” that leads to disease, says Lennard Lee, an oncologist at the University of Oxford. Several mRNA vaccines are in the works that will tackle everything from ovarian, colorectal, lung and pancreatic cancers. Vaccines are even being developed for diseases that aren’t threatening humans — yet. The lessons learned from the creation of COVID vaccines have served as a sort of canary in the coal mine for the entire arena of mRNA vaccine research. But if we need more vaccines that target more cancers, that just means we have to speed up trials and continue the pace that started with COVID, says Lee. And even more than that, we need more cooperation like the type that helped advance the COVID vaccine so rapidly. 

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