Apr 16, 2023
Updated: Apr 25, 2023
Hot on the heels of a major breakthrough on a cure for Parkinson's disease by the Michael. J. Fox Foundation, a major pharmaceutical company has announced that vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions could be ready this decade.
Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, told The Guardian that he is confident the firm will be able to offer such options for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.
“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 personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world,” Burton said.
Burton credits the success of these new treatments partially to Covid-19. “I think it was an order of magnitude, that the pandemic sped [this technology] up by. It has also allowed us to scale up manufacturing, so we’ve got extremely good at making large amounts of vaccine very quickly,” explained the scientist.
Other experts are in agreement with Burton.
“There has been a massive acceleration, not just of traditional vaccine technologies, but also novel ones that hadn’t previously been taken through licensure. Certainly, mRNA falls into that category, as does our vaccine,” said Dr Filip Dubovsky, president of research and development at Novavax.
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