Moderna seeking to roll out vaccines for cancer, heart disease by end of decade

Pharmaceutical giant Moderna is aiming to introduce vaccines for cancer, heart disease, and other life-threatening conditions by 2030, a spokesperson for the company said Monday.

A CNBC report confirmed remarks by Paul Burton, the firm’s chief medical officer, hailing the “tremendous promise” of vaccine studies in an interview with The Guardian on Saturday. Some researchers said 15 years of progress were condensed into 12-18 months thanks to the innovations made by the company’s lifesaving mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology,” Burton said.

The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines work by injecting a genetic code for the spike protein that coats the surface of the coronavirus. That code, the mRNA, is encased in a little ball of fat and instructs the body’s cells to make some harmless spike copies that train the immune system to recognize the real virus.

The method is being used by Moderna to develop vaccines that target various different types of tumors. The firm’s cancer jab was granted breakthrough therapy designation by the US Food and Drug Administration in February, meaning its regulatory review will be accelerated after successes on melanoma patients.

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The status was also given in January to a shot against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which was 83.7 percent effective in preventing at least two symptoms, like cough and fever, in adults aged 60 and over.

“We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world,” Burton said.

“I think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for COVID, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case,” he told the newspaper.

“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease,” he added.

Burton also said that a single shot could cover a range of different respiratory diseases, including COVID, flu, and RSV.

Moderna said it started developing its mRNA technology platform in 2010, which helped the company quickly produce its COVID-19 vaccine after the pandemic arrived in early 2020.

By the end of that year, US regulators had cleared shots from both Pfizer and Moderna for use after clinical research showed that both were highly effective, turning the companies into household names.