One of the unexpected ripple effects of the global pandemic is how it catalyzed medical breakthroughs.
Most prominently, the same technology used in SARS-CoV-2 vaccines has the potential to improve treatments for diseases like cancer and HIV.
Scientists said mRNA vaccines could theoretically be programmed specifically for a patient’s cancer cells, to create personalised therapies.
The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine injects a snippet of messenger RNA, which enters the patient and causes their cells to manufacture a small piece of the coronavirus called the spike protein
Since cancer mutations are unique and specific to every human being’s specific cancer, the mRNA vaccine would be tailored to a given patient.
This is possible because cancer cells have unique proteins on their surface, and the mRNA vaccines can be programmed for those exact proteins to generate antibodies.
This way, doctors hope to prepare the patient’s immune system to recognise the cancer and kill it.
Pharmaceutical and biotech companies already see the potential in these new treatments.
For example, BioNTech is testing mRNA vaccines aimed at overexpressed but unmutated proteins.
Moderna is similarly building mRNA therapies that instruct the immune system to recognise mutations made by cancerous proteins in a gene called KRAS.
Significant advancement is also going on HIV treatments, even as researchers at Scripps University in California have developed a preliminary vaccine that shows promise for preventing HIV infections.
The vaccine’s goal is to stimulate the immune system to produce “broadly neutralising antibodies,” which are meant to attach to the HIV spike protein that enters the cells and neutralise them.
mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine to protect against infectious diseases.
