Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines

The mRNA technology behind coronavirus vaccines is now being used to create bespoke vaccines for cancer patients.

Lennard Lee, a UK National Health Service oncologist and medical director at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, calls himself just a “simple doctor,” but he’s anything but. During the pandemic, he led clinical efforts that showed it was still safe to give cancer patients chemotherapy, disproving fears that the coronavirus made this too risky, helping to maintain cancer treatment worldwide. He also delivered UK research that showed lateral flow testing was effective in identifying the most infectious Covid patients.

His most important project, however, is the one he’s currently leading as the national government advisor for mRNA cancer vaccines. This new type of vaccine, which is based on the same technology as the Covid vaccines first developed by BioNTech and Moderna, is seen by many as a potential breakthrough in the fight against cancer. Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health in London next week, Lee tells WIRED why he hopes these vaccines will prove to be the “silver lining of the pandemic.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: There are currently hundreds of mRNA cancer vaccine trials ongoing worldwide. How did the success of mRNA Covid vaccines kickstart this?

Lennard Lee: Cancer vaccines weren’t a proper field of research before the pandemic. There was nothing. Apart from one exception, pretty much every clinical trial had failed. With the pandemic, however, we proved that mRNA vaccines were possible.

mRNA cancer vaccines work by giving the body instructions to make a harmless piece of a cancer-related protein. This trains the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells carrying that protein. Think of it like a training manual for security guards. The vaccine gives the immune system a guide on what cancer looks like, so it knows exactly who to watch for and remove.

Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient.

In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.

In the UK, you set up the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad at the end of 2022 to fast-track cancer vaccine trials. Why set up such an ambitious project right after the Covid pandemic?

The pandemic was ending, the Omicron variant was much milder than previous variants, and everyone had had their vaccines. Research in the area of Covid vaccines was starting to close down, but companies like Moderna and BioNTech were trying to figure out what to do next, because there wasn’t going to be a need for a Covid vaccine market forever. So they started to pivot to cancer vaccines using mRNA technology, and they were looking for countries with proven capabilities for vaccine research and manufacture.

In the meantime, the UK was ready. We had fridges and we had world-class manufacturing and research facilities. During the pandemic, we had proven we could open and deliver clinical trials fast. Also, the UK had established a genomic global lead with Genomics England and the 100,000 Genome Project. All doctors and nurses in this country are trained in genomics. That was a big signpost for any pharmaceutical industry.

So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.

During the pandemic, the UK was opening clinical trials in a matter of a few weeks. But before it used to take years to complete a clinical trial. What changed?

It was really fascinating, because for many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.

Of course, opening a clinical trial during a pandemic is not necessarily the same as a clinical trial for cancer. But you had a breakthrough moment for the cancer vaccine project at an early stage.

There was a trial run by BioNTech, called BNT122, on people with high-risk bowel cancer, which was not recruiting very well across the world. So when we announced the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, the UK cancer community took that opportunity. We opened that trial at Birmingham University Hospital, which was the most surprising thing for me, because it is not a leading cancer vaccine studies center.

We needed to get 10,000 patients enrolled in the trial, and we got there within the course of three months. It was quite amazing. It just goes to show that because we’re a single health care system, we can do this much quicker than any other country.

The dominoes started falling very quickly on the back of that success: we opened a head and neck cancer trial in Liverpool, an esophageal and gastric cancer trial in Dundee, and a lung cancer trial in London. We started to create a community of people who were all pushing for launching cancer vaccine trials as quickly as possible.

Several mRNA-based cancer vaccines are in late-stage clinical trials internationally, and the UK is currently running 15 cancer-vaccine trials. When will we see the first approved mRNA cancer vaccine?

We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.

What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive.

Hear Lennard Lee speak at WIRED Health on March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at health.wired.com.

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