mRNA vaccines made headlines this year as they protected millions of people against COVID-19. But mRNA vaccines have been a decades-long subject of investigation for many diseases, including cancer.
“mRNA vaccines are a great candidate for cancer therapy,” said John Cooke, medical director of the RNA Therapeutics Program at Houston Methodist. “They are a biological software that can be rapidly generated, modified, and delivered.”
Therapeutics specifically targeting tumors are notoriously tricky to design, and mRNA vaccines are no exception. But years of research has finally pushed a handful of mRNA-based cancer vaccines into clinical trials. The rapid development and success of the mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 has also given these efforts a boost. In the past year, there has been increased interest in these mRNA-based immunotherapies. Scott Kopetz, a physician-scientist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, started working with BioNTech on a cancer mRNA vaccine trial before ...
