Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines - Wired [View all]

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Lennard Lee, a UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, calls himself just a “simple doctor,” but he’s anything but. During the pandemic, he led clinical efforts that showed it was still safe to give cancer patients chemotherapy, disproving fears that the coronavirus made this too risky, helping to maintain cancer treatment worldwide. He also delivered UK research that showed lateral flow testing was effective in identifying the most infectious Covid patients.

His most important project, however, is the one he’s currently leading as the national government advisor for mRNA cancer vaccines. This new type of vaccine, which is based on the same technology as the Covid vaccines first developed by BioNTech and Moderna, is seen by many as a potential breakthrough in the fight against cancer. Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health in London next week, Lee tells WIRED why he hopes these vaccines will prove to be the “silver lining of the pandemic.”

Lennard Lee: Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove. Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

https://www.wired.com/story/wired-health-lennard-lee-cancer-vaccines/