The Other Big C: Thanks to the rapid development of the Covid vaccines - could we see cancer vaccines available to patients by the end of the decade?

At the start of this year, BioNTech announced a strategic partnership with the UK government to provide up to 10,000 patients with personalised mRNA cancer immunotherapies by 2030.

This is a significant development in transforming outcomes for cancer patients and strengthens the UK’s position as a leader in global life sciences.

When Covid-19 came along, and mRNA was repurposed to make vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus – hundreds of millions of such mRNA vaccines made by companies like Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have now been administered to people globally.

This surge in mRNA vaccine research for Covid-19 has accelerated the advancement of an mRNA cancer vaccine – which scientists had previously been researching for over twenty years.

There are two main aims of the mRNA cancer vaccines under development: the first is to prevent cancer from recurring and metastasising in patients who have already been treated; and the second is to treat patients who have advanced cancers that have already spread by combining approaches with CAR T-cell or other cell therapies to try and shrink large, rapidly growing tumours and prolong the lives of such patients who have been told they only have a few months left to live.

Therefore, the way mRNA vaccines intend to work in cancer patients is radically different to Covid-19 vaccines. The focus is not prevention, instead they are personalised medicines that train the patient’s immune system in how to fight their own individual cancer.

Although the details of the partnership between BioNTech and the UK Government is not publicly available, we understand that the next steps of the collaboration will be the selection of candidates, trial sites and the set-up of a development plan with the aim of being ready to enrol the first cancer patient in the second half of this year.

However, personalised medicines such as cancer vaccines are by nature extremely expensive, being complex, bespoke products. As a result, while experts say that the UK Government’s partnership with BioNTech is promising, much work has still to be done to determine whether the cost can be justified for the NHS, should they pass clinical trials.

Professor Uğur Şahin, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of BioNTech holds an optimistic view that, in one form or another, by the end of the decade we could have many mRNA cancer vaccines routinely available to patients. He said:

 “We believe that this will happen on an even broader scale before 2030. The Covid-19 vaccine and our expertise in developing it has contributed to our work in oncology. We have learned how to better and faster manufacture vaccines, we have learned about how the immune system reacts to mRNA in a large number of people. And not only have we learned about mRNA vaccines and how to deal with them, but also the regulators, so all this will support the acceleration of the development of mRNA-based cancer vaccines.”

For more information on mRNA, my colleagues wrote an excellent series of articles “Spotlight on mRNA” in 2021, which you can find here. In particular, if you would like to take a closer look at mRNA, what it is and what it could potentially be used for (including cancer immunotherapy) please read Ellen Lambrix's second article of the five part series here.