Experts say that new medicines that treat heart diseases and autoimmune diseases could save the lives of millions of people all over the world.
The Guardian said that Dr. Paul Burton of Medorna says the company will be able to offer these kinds of treatments for “all kinds of disease areas” in as little as five years.
Researchers say that efforts that used to take at least 15 years have been cut down to 12 to 18 months. This is a good sign for the studies that are still going on. The COVID-19 medicines are to blame for everything.
Dr. Richard Hackett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI), said, “The biggest effect of the pandemic was to shorten the development timelines for many previously unvalidated vaccine platforms.” He added, “It meant that things that might have happened over the next 10 or 15 years were compressed into a year or a year and a half…”
Medorna made a potential COVID-19 vaccine and is now working on cancer vaccines that will target “different types of tumors.”
Burton, who is the chief medical officer of Moderna, said, “We will have that vaccine, and it will be very successful and save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. I think we will be able to give personalized cancer medicines to people all over the world against many different types of tumors.
He also said, “A single injection could protect against Covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and mRNA therapies could be used to treat rare diseases for which there are no drugs yet.” Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that starts the body’s immune reaction against disease.
Burton said, “I think we’ll have mRNA-based treatments for rare diseases that we couldn’t treat before, and I think that in 10 years, we’ll be getting close to a world where you can really find the genetic cause of a disease and, using mRNA-based technology, go edit it out and fix it.”
mRNA molecules tell the cell how to make proteins, and by injecting a synthetic version of them, cells can make the proteins they need for defense.
A vaccine made from mRNA would let the immune system of a person with the disease know what was going on. Then, the vaccine would attack the illnesses directly without hurting healthy cells.
The process finds the protein pieces that are in cancer cells and then makes mRNA that tells the body how to make its own protein pieces to fight the disease.
At first, the doctors look at the patient’s tumor and send it to the lab to see if there are any genetic changes in healthy cells that could cause cancer.
After running it through an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, it finds abnormal cells and highlights parts of these abnormal proteins that could trigger an immune reaction. In the end, the mRNAs are used to make medicines.
Burton also said, “I think what we’ve learned in the past few months is that mRNA isn’t just for infectious diseases or COVID. If you thought that before, the evidence shows that you were wrong.”
“It can be used for many different kinds of diseases. We are working on cancer, infectious diseases, heart diseases, autoimmune diseases, and rare diseases. All of these places have been studied, and they all show a lot of promise.”
In January, Moderna released the results of a late-stage trial of its experimental mRNA vaccine for RSV. The results showed that “it was 83.7% effective at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in adults aged 60 and older.”
Using this information, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave its vaccine the “breakthrough therapy” label, which means that work to get it on the market will move faster.
In February, the FDA gave the cancer vaccine Medorna a similar title after seeing how it worked for people with melanoma, a type of skin cancer.
Burton said, “I think the pandemic sped up this technology by at least an order of magnitude. It’s also helped us make more vaccines at once, so we’re very good at making a lot of vaccines very quickly.
Pfizer also worked on an mRNA vaccine for influenza and tried to make vaccines for illnesses that spread quickly.
“What we learned from making the COVID-19 vaccine has changed the way we do research and development on mRNA and how Pfizer does research and development in general. “In just one year, we learned as much about science as we did in ten years,” a Pfizer spokesman said in a statement.
The COVID pandemic also helped other types of vaccines, like Novavax’s protein-based vaccines.
The shot makes the immune system work by making the body think it is being attacked by a virus.
Filip Dubovsky, who is the president of Research and Development at Novavax, said, “There has been a huge acceleration, not just of traditional vaccine technologies, but also of new ones that hadn’t been licensed before. mRNA and our vaccine both fall into this group.”
Experts worried, though, that all the work done over years would be for nothing if the cause didn’t get enough money.
Prof. Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said, “If you take a step back and think about what we are willing to spend in during peacetime, like having a large military for most countries… Pandemics are just as big of a threat, if not bigger, than war threats, because we know they will happen no matter what. But we’re not spending even the amount it would take to build one nuclear submarine.”