The two BioNTec scientists who developed the anti-Covid vaccination, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, are confident about achieving in five years a vaccine against cancer, based on the same messenger-RNA (m-RNA) technology. Indeed, their m-RNA research was aimed at a cancer vaccine from the beginning, and it was put to use in developing the Covid vaccine because of the pandemic.
“We have 15 cancer vaccines undergoing clinical trials, the most advanced being the one against melanoma,” they said in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica.
The m-RNA technique “is the oldest form of programming built by nature, because it passes the instructions to the cells to produce proteins. We immediately understood the enormous potential there was in providing information—at our will—directly to immune cells, encoding them in the m-RNA. Then let the immune system do what it does best: protect our bodies from threats,” explained the couple, who founded BioNtech in 2002. So, the pandemic represented only the baptism of fire. “In 2022,” they stressed, “we plan to start clinical trials for vaccines against malaria and tuberculosis. And we will continue with our program of an HIV vaccine. But it does not end there: m-RNA allows us to reprogram the immune system not only to stimulate it, but also to calm it, and this will be important for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, where the damage is done by a hyper-reactive immune system, and in regenerative medicine.”
