The development of the COVID-19 vaccine was a gamechanger and a lifesaver in this pandemic—and it turns out that its influence might extend to other diseases as well. That’s because the COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna are the first widespread use of mRNA technology, which has been studied for decades in the field of oncology. Now that scientists have found a way to use mRNA to prevent the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, studies are underway at places like Penn Medicine and Harvard Medical School to examine whether mRNA technology is effective and safe at treating conditions like melanoma, lung cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS.
How do mRNA vaccines work and how are they different from traditional vaccines?
With a traditional vaccine, a small portion of a virus known as an antigen is shot into your body. There’s not enough of the virus to actually make you sick—it’s just enough to trigger your immune system to create the antibodies you need to prevent sickness. That way, if you’re ever actually exposed to the real virus, your immune system knows what to do.
On the other hand, mRNA technology relies on what’s known as messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA for short. Think of mRNA as a genetic guidebook for all of your body’s cells—it’s what tells your body how to make the proteins necessary for functions like growth, energy production, and defense against disease.
For an mRNA vaccine, scientists create a strand of mRNA in a lab that can tell your cells how to create spike proteins that look like the coronavirus. Your immune system responds appropriately and now knows how to fend off a COVID-19 infection.
What does this mean for treating other diseases like cancer?
Good question. Scientists have spent years trying to develop other treatment options as an alternative to chemotherapy, which often makes patients nauseous and can harm other body cells in addition to the cancer cells it targets.
The hope now is that mRNA technology can be tailored to certain diseases so that the body knows how to fight them. However, these would be slightly different from mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, which are prophylactic—in other words, they’re intended to prevent a disease, not treat it. In the case of mRNA to treat cancer, mRNA would be an intervention—a treatment for patients who are already sick. Currently, scientists are recruiting participants for phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials to assess the efficacy and safety of therapeutic mRNA vaccines.
