mRNA technology and artificial intelligence are set to make a huge difference.
Vaccines were one of the extraordinary success stories of the pandemic. Now scientists hope the same mRNA technology that underpinned the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 jabs can be used to train the immune system to recognise and attack cancer.
These jabs work by providing an instruction to the patient’s cells to churn out a particular protein that acts as a flag for the immune system to target. In this case, scientists are tailoring the vaccine design to proteins on the surface of a patient’s cancer cells.
In August, hundreds of patients entered the world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine trial for melanoma and trials are under way for pancreatic, bowel and other cancers. And since the protection afforded by vaccines can be long-lasting, it may be possible to use the approach as a preventive measure, for those with high genetic risk of breast or ovarian cancer, and to stop cancer returning.
Alongside the development of cancer-targeting mRNA vaccines, artificial intelligence is primed to help detect cancers more quickly. The earlier cancer can be diagnosed, the better.
The coming years will almost certainly witness rapid progress in the use of AI to better diagnose serious illnesses like lung cancers and brain tumours, which should mean longer lives.
The tech is being rolled out in hospitals, including several in the north of England, to catch cancers quicker and prolong lives. The system, which scans x-rays and prioritises cases where it spots something suspicious that the human clinician may have missed, has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy by 45 percent and diagnostic efficiency by 12 percent, according to one NHS Foundation Trust.