London, Europe Brief News – Cancer Vaccine will be available before the end of the decade, according to the husband and wife team behind one of the most successful Covid vaccines.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, who co-founded BioNTech, responsible for the lifesaving Covid vaccine, are now back with new discoveries to destroy cancer cells.
Development of a cancer vaccine may be accelerated by BioNTech’s COVID work.
The duo described how the mRNA technology at the heart of BioNTech’s Covid booster could be repurposed so that it primed the immune system to attack cancer cells instead of invading coronaviruses.
They both previously worked together to pioneer cancer immunotherapies tailored to individual patients, having co-founded BioNTech together in Mainz, Germany, in 2008.
The husband-and-wife team, who successfully developed the Pfizer, have said their progress during the pandemic on the use of mRNA technology “gives back to our cancer work”.
While typical vaccines contain a small portion of the virus used for immunisation, mRNAs distinctively use only the virus’ genetic code.
This functions in a similar way once injected into the body, allowing the body to produce antigens and build up the immune system against the disease.
Scientists have been working on a cancer vaccine for decades. One approach is to teach the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells, ideally preventing cancer from growing in the first place.
