Around 500,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in the UK every year - almost half as many die from it each year. Treatment is often accompanied by drastic physical consequences for patients.
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However, Biontech CEO Dr. Uğur Şahin now claims to have found a solution to this problem - he hopes to bring new mRNA-based vaccines to the market by 2030, which will provide an alternative to chemotherapy and enable patients to receive more personalized treatment.
Individual cancer therapy for those affected
As reported by the BILD newspaper, zdf heute and Focus Online, among others, the treatment of cancer is to be optimized in such a way that the body fights the disease using its own immune system. So-called immunotherapies are currently being developed against various types of cancer such as breast cancer - which men can also get - or pancreatic cancer. For the latter, researchers have developed a special type of gene therapy that gives hope to those affected for the first time.
Furthermore, the therapy is to be individually adapted to each patient - after blood and tumor samples have been examined, the appropriate vaccine is to be provided within four weeks. The cancer characteristics of the patients are examined individually in order to identify those that enable the immune system to recognize and fight as many cancer cells as possible.
Hope for the future
As Şahin explains in an interview with BILD, this treatment method has been researched for 25 years. On the one hand, therapy with mRNA-based cancer vaccines against small tumors or metastases and CAR T-cell therapy against larger tumors, for which there have recently been promising study results, are considered promising.
It is also hoped that so-called ACDs, i.e. antibodies to chemotherapy, will combat the cancer cells in a more targeted manner. Şahin hopes that these approaches will replace the chemotherapy used to date in a few years' time. It remains to be seen how cancer research in general will develop. Not so long ago, researchers also developed a new treatment method for terminal cancer.
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This article has been translated from Gentside DE.
Sources used:
BILD: "BILD zu Besuch im Biontech-LaborKrebs-Impfstoffe kommen noch vor 2030!"
zdf heute: "Alternative zu Chemotherapien :Biontech plant Krebs-Impfstoffe vor 2030"
Focus Online: "'Tumor finden und zerstören': Biontech plant Krebs-Impfstoffe für Zehntausende Patienten bis 2030"
