A pharmaceutical firm that produced a leading Covid-19 jab said vaccines against cancer as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases can be ready by 2030, which could potentially save millions of lives.
Modernas chief medical officer Paul Burton believes the company will be able to offer vaccines for all sorts of disease areas in as little as five years.
Studies into the vaccines have shown tremendous promise, Dr Burton told British newspaper The Guardian, adding that his company is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumour types.
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 personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world, he said.
Cardiovascular diseases and cancer are a leading cause of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
An estimated 17.9 million people died of cardiovascular diseases in 2019, said WHO, while cancer accounted for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths.
Dr Burton also told The Guardian that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection.
This would allow vulnerable people to be protected against Covid-19, flu and respiratory syncytial virus a virus that causes mild, cold-like symptoms.
Meanwhile, Dr Burton said messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs.
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.
Vaccines based on mRNA teach cells to make a protein to prompt an immune response.
Moderna and drugmaker Pfizer-BioNTech were the first to use the technology to create the mRNA vaccines used to fight Covid-19.
Dr Burton attributed the progress of the vaccines to advancement in the field of mRNA, with some experts saying that 15 years of progress are now in the final stretches due to the quick roll-out of the Covid-19 jabs.
I think what we have learnt in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for Covid-19, the evidence now is that thats absolutely not the case, The Guardian quoted him as saying.
It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studies in all of those areas, and they have all shown tremendous promise. More On This Topic MOH supporting development of mRNA cancer vaccines in Singapore Moderna, Merck see positive results from skin cancer vaccine In December 2022, Moderna and pharmaceutical company MSD announced that an mRNA cancer vaccine they are jointly developing reduced cancer recurrence or death in melanoma patients by 44 per cent in a phase two clinical trial.
Scientists said a high level of investment is needed to maintain the progress.
Professor Andrew Pollard, a director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of Britains Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said it was important not to lose sight of the threat of a new pandemic.
If you take a step back to think about what we are prepared to invest in during peacetime, like having a substantial military for most countries… Pandemics are as much a threat, if not more, than a military threat because we know they are going to happen as a certainty from where we are today. But were not investing even the amount that it would cost to build one nuclear submarine, he told The Guardian.
