In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists raced to develop vaccines in record time. The first reliable vaccines, using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, were a historic breakthrough — so much so that their development earned the 2023 Nobel Prize. But what many people don’t realize is that mRNA vaccines had been in the works for decades.
Researchers had struggled for years to make them viable, progressing in painstaking increments. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 crisis — when global funding and urgency skyrocketed — that they finally reached their full potential. Yet, ironically, these vaccines weren’t originally designed to combat infectious diseases. They were meant to fight cancer.
Now, after proving their worth, mRNA vaccines may finally fulfill that original mission.
A Silver Lining in the Pandemic’s Wake
Lennard Lee, an oncologist with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), is among those pioneering the shift. Before COVID he told Wired, mRNA cancer vaccines weren’t doing so well. “Pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.”
The technology behind mRNA vaccines is simple yet powerful: instead of introducing a weakened virus or a portion of a virus, these vaccines use strands of genetic code to instruct the body to recognize and fight disease. The implications for cancer treatment are profound. “Going from mRNA COVID vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward,” Lee explains. “Same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.”
Unlike with COVID, cancer vaccines aren’t meant for preventing disease, they’re meant for treatment. This brings in an additional challenge of customization.
Traditional vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize foreign invaders — bacteria, viruses, or toxins. But cancer poses a unique challenge: it originates from the body’s own cells, meaning the immune system often fails to see tumors as threats. So instead of the one-size-fits-all approach taken with the widespread usage of mRNA COVID jabs, these new cancer vaccines must be personalized for each individual patient.
The process is painstaking but also remarkably elegant. Doctors take a biopsy of the tumor, sequence its DNA, and use that information to design a vaccine specific to that person’s cancer. This vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize and attack those cancer cells, preventing relapse and potentially eradicating the disease altogether.
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“That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else,” Lee told Wired. “It’s like science fiction.” But it’s not science fiction; the results are already coming in.
Early Promising Results
At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Dr. Vinod Balachandran is running clinical trials testing mRNA cancer vaccines on patients with pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat forms of the disease. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is grim, with only about 10% of patients surviving more than five years.
Balachandran’s team has been studying long-term pancreatic cancer survivors — those rare individuals who beat the odds and lived for many years after their diagnosis. What they found was intriguing: these survivors’ immune systems had somehow been able to recognize and attack their tumors in ways that most patients’ immune systems could not.
That insight led to a simple but profound question: Could we teach other patients’ immune systems to do the same? The answer, it seems, is yes.
In Balachandran’s trial, patients received a personalized mRNA vaccine in addition to standard treatments like surgery and chemotherapy. Of the 16 participants, eight had strong immune responses to the vaccine. Among those eight, only two had their cancer return after more than three years. In contrast, nearly all of the patients who did not generate a strong immune response saw their cancer come back.
Meanwhile, at King’s College London, a different experimental mRNA vaccine has shown promise in advanced-stage lung cancer and melanoma. Results presented in September 2024 showed that patients who received the vaccine had their immune systems activated against tumor markers, and in some cases, their cancer stopped progressing. This is still only a Phase I (early stage) trial, but the findings suggest that even late-stage cancers could be treated with the right mRNA approach.
“This study evaluating an mRNA cancer immunotherapy is an important first step in hopefully developing a new treatment for patients with advanced cancers,” said UK’s Chief Investigator of the trial Dr Debashis Sarker, a Clinical Reader in Experimental Oncology in the School of Cancer & Pharmaceutical Sciences.
“The trial continues to recruit patients with melanoma and lung cancers and is a huge international effort across the UK, USA, Spain and Australia.”
In England, thousands of patients are already set to gain fast-tracked access to trials of mRNA cancer vaccine, following a national “matchmaking” service to identify eligible patients.
A New Era in Cancer Treatment?
We are witnessing what may be the dawn of a new age in cancer research. Decades of frustration and failure have given way to rapid progress, fueled by the lessons learned from fighting COVID-19.
But there are also major challenges.
Some of those are scientific. Not all tumors produce the same antigens, making it difficult to design vaccines that work universally. New techniques are being developed to broaden the immune system’s recognition of cancer cells, but testing takes time. Then, there are also logistical challenges, as scaling up an individualized treatment will require significant infrastructure. Having access to COVID-19 infrastructure makes it easier but doesn’t solve the problem.
Then, there’s public acceptance.
Despite the success of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, vaccine hesitancy remains a significant issue. Some US states are actively pushing for a ban on mRNA vaccines of all sorts. Some Republican lawmakers are even pushing to charge doctors who give the injections with criminal penalties and fines. Even as these vaccines helped us end the pandemic, even as the science has shown their worth, they’re still facing massive opposition. RFK Jr, Trump’s controversial US Health and Human Services Secretary, is also targeting mRNA vaccines.
Despite these challenges, the potential benefits are enormous. If cancer vaccines continue to prove effective, they could become a game-changer in oncology, offering new hope to millions of patients.
It’s not a magic bullet. But it’s a leap forward, one that could redefine our fight against cancer for generations to come. If we don’t fall prey to pseudoscience in the meantime.