According to experts, new vaccines developed to treat autoimmune and cardiac diseases have the potential to save millions of lives worldwide.
The firm will be able to provide such treatments for “all sorts of illness regions,” according to Dr. Paul Burton of Medorna, in as little as five years, according to Guardian.
A current study on the topic is showing encouraging results, with researchers noting that the efforts, which had previously taken at least 15 years to complete, have now only required 12 to 18 months. All of this is attributable to the COVID-19 vaccinations.
Dr. Richard Hackett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) said: “The biggest impact of the pandemic had been the shortening of development timelines for many previously unvalidated vaccine platforms, adding that “It meant that things that might have unspooled over the next decade or even 15 years, were compressed down into a year or a year and a half…”
In addition to developing a promising COVID-19 vaccine, Medorna is preparing to produce cancer vaccines that will specifically target “different types of tumors.”
Burton who is the chief medical officer of Moderna said: “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 personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”
He also noted: “Multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection – allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) – while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body’s immune response against disease.”
“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,” Burton said.
Cells can produce the proteins needed for immunity by infusing the synthetic form of the mRNA molecules that provide the instructions for building proteins in the cell.
A vaccination based on mRNA would notify a patient’s immune system of the disease. The vaccine would then go straight after the diseases without harming healthy cells.
The procedure recognizes the protein fragments that are present in cancer cells before producing mRNA that instructs the body to make its own protein fragments to combat the disease.
First, doctors analyze the patient’s tumor and send it to a lab to determine whether any healthy cells have genetic mutations that can cause cancer.
An artificial intelligence (AI) system is used to identify abnormal cells and highlights regions of these abnormal proteins that may trigger an immune response. Ultimately, vaccines made from the mRNAs are produced.
Burton also stated: “I think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for COVID, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case.”
“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studied in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.”
Read Also: Boosting productivity with AI
Source: thenews.com
