Godfather of mRNA vaccines reveals plans to immunize people against CANCER years before tumors strike to ‘prevent the disease from ever appearing’

An mRNA vaccine pioneer has revealed plans to create a new vaccine that immunizes against cancer, more than a decade before it appears.

Dr Drew Weissman won this year’s Nobel Prize for his discovery of a way to introduce genetic instructions to induce an immune response against Covid. This discovery helped save millions of lives and lead the world out of the pandemic.

Now he is using this discovery to create an mRNA vaccine against the world’s other leading killer: cancer.

The vaccines being developed at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Weissman conducts his research, teach the body to recognize tumor cells and fight them when they form.

Dr. Drew Weissman, a vaccine researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, was a pioneer in mRNA vaccine research and won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of how to deliver mRNA genetic instructions into the body to trigger an immune response against Covid.

The mRNA platform could easily be coded to target specific types of cancer. This is a major advantage because the cancer is very specific to each patient and requires treatment tailored specifically to them.

The vaccines are intended for people with genetic mutations that increase the risk of developing cancer, such as the BRCA gene, which affects the risk of breast cancer.

Dr. Weissman said at the Nobel Prize lecture in medicine: “The idea here is that you treat people before they develop cancer… and perhaps prevent cancer from occurring in those patients entirely.”

Cancers resulting from genetic mutations account for five to 10 percent of the more than 18 million cancer cases worldwide each year.

Environmental and lifestyle factors such as smoking, obesity, stress and lack of physical activity can also increase the risk of the disease.

Dr. Weissman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania decided to find a way to make the mRNA vaccine more effective by encoding it with genetic instructions that allow the body to produce a specific subset of immune cells that kill cancer cells.

In this set of genetic instructions given to mice to create an antibody response, the researchers included mRNA that teaches the body to make a protein called IL-12, which plays a critical role as a messenger that facilitates communication between cells.

IL-12 directs the body to produce a specific type of immune cell called effector T cells, which Dr. Weissman says can effectively clear cancer from the body and even prevent it from occurring in people at the highest genetic risk.

He said: “We know that it takes five or ten years for cancer cells to start appearing before you have full-fledged large tumors that impair function.

“If we treat these people perhaps every five years with a vaccine that produces only effector T cells, we will purify, destroy and kill all the transformed cells.”

Katalin Kariko (left) and Drew Weissman (right) helped change the course of the pandemic. Before millions of people around the world were given mRNA injections to protect against Covid, the technology was considered experimental. Researchers are now looking into whether it could help fight cancer and other diseases.

Administration of IL-12 mRNA also increased the activation and coverage of effector T cells by 10-fold. They became so widespread that they were found in both the spleen and lymph nodes.

One of the major advantages of the mRNA platform for Covid vaccines was its versatility, which greatly helped when new sinister variants took over.

The platform can be adapted to include genetic information encoding various pathogens, especially viruses.

They can also be easily coded to target specific antigens or proteins that are found on cancer cells and act as signals to the body that something is wrong.

This makes mRNA technology particularly attractive for protection against cancers, which are highly specific to each individual patient and require precise treatments tailored specifically to them.

currently there is 35 mRNA vaccine candidates for cancer is in development and targets a variety of cancers, including melanoma, bladder, esophageal, kidney, triple negative breast and colorectal cancer.

The umbrella term “cancer” covers hundreds of different diseases, many of which would have been a death sentence just a couple of decades ago.

Thanks to medical advances in the development of targeted therapies and drugs that stimulate the immune system to fight cancer cells, some of the most difficult cancers to treat, such as metastatic melanoma, are highly treatable.

These stunning medical advances mean that cancer patients are a third less likely to die from the disease than they were just 30 years ago. Since 1990, 3.8 million cancer deaths have been prevented.