But look again at some of these new vaccines. And then contemplate the dawn of the future – not only its first rays in the coming months, but also the bright light of the years and decades to come. It seems increasingly plausible that the same weapons we will use to defeat Covid-19 can also defeat even the darkest reapers – including cancer, which kills nearly 10 million people a year.
The most promising Covid vaccines use nucleic acids called messenger RNA or mRNA. A vaccine comes from the German company BioNTech SE and its American partner Pfizer Inc. The other is from the American company Moderna Inc. (initial spelling was ModeRNA, its marker is MRNA). Another is on the way from CureVac NV, also based in Germany.
Common vaccines tend to be inactivated or weakened viruses that, when injected into the body, stimulate an immune response that can subsequently protect against the living pathogen. But the process of making these vaccines requires various chemicals and cell cultures. This takes time and provides opportunities for contamination.
MRNA vaccines do not have these problems. They instruct the body itself to produce offensive proteins – in this case, those that envelop the SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA. The immune system is then in these antigens, practicing for the day when the same proteins appear with the attached coronavirus.
Here’s the biggest promise of mRNA: it can tell our cells to produce whatever protein we want. This includes the antigens of many other diseases besides Covid-19.
In its daily function, mRNA takes instructions from its molecular cousin, the DNA in cell nuclei. It stretches stretches of the genome, which the mRNA transports into the cytoplasm, where small cell factories called ribosomes use the information to produce proteins.
BioNTech and Moderna shorten this process, omitting the entire difficult business from the core with DNA. Instead, they first realize what proteins they want – for example, a cape on a cape around a virus. Then look at the amino acid sequence that produces this protein. From this derives the precise instructions that mRNA must give.
This process can be relatively fast, which is why it took less than a year to make the vaccines, a previously unimaginable pace. It is also genetically safe – mRNA cannot return to the nucleus and can accidentally insert genes into our DNA.
Researchers since the 1970s have understood that you can use this technique to fight all kinds of diseases. But, as usual in science, you need huge amounts of money, time and patience to solve all the intermediate problems. After a decade of enthusiasm, mRNA became academically fashionable in the 1990s. Progress seemed stopped. The main obstacle was that injection of mRNA into animals often caused fatal inflammation.
Katalin Kariko enters – a Hungarian scientist who immigrated to the USA in the 1980s and heroically dedicated his entire career to mRNA, through ups and downs. In the 1990s, she lost her funding, was demoted, her salary was reduced and she suffered other failures. But he stayed with her. And then, after battling cancer herself, she made the crucial discovery.
In the 2000s, she and her research partner realized that changing uridine, one of the “letters” of mRNA, avoided causing inflammation without compromising the code. The mice survived.
Her study was read by Stanford University scientist Derrick Rossi, who later co-founded Moderna. He also came to the attention of Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, two oncologists who are husband and wife and co-founder of BioNTech. They licensed Kariko technology and hired her. From the beginning, they were most interested in curing cancer.
Today’s anti-cancer weapons will one day seem as primitive as flint axes in an operating room. To kill a malignant tumor, you usually push it with radiation or chemicals, damaging many other tissues in the process.
Sahin and Tureci realized that the best way to fight cancer is to treat each tumor as a unique genetics and to train the immune systems of individual patients against that specific enemy. A perfect job for mRNA. Find the antigen, get his fingerprint, check the cell instructions to target the culprit, and let the body do the rest.
Take a look at Moderna and BioNTech pipelines. These include drug studies to treat cancers of the breast, prostate, skin, pancreas, brain, lungs and other tissues, as well as vaccines against everything from the flu to Zika and rabies. The prospects look good.
Of course, progress has been slow. Part of the explanation given by Sahin and Tureci is that investors in this sector have to raise a lot of capital and then wait more than a decade, first for tests, then for regulatory approvals. In the past, too few were in the mood.
Covid-19, with its fingers crossed, can turbo charge all these processes. The pandemic led to a major debut of mRNA vaccines and their definitive proof of concept. Already, there are rumors of a Nobel Prize for Kariko. Furthermore, mRNA will no longer have problems obtaining money, attention or enthusiasm – from investors, regulators and policy makers.
This does not mean that the last stretch will be easy. But in this dark hour, it is permissible to let yourself be left in the rising light.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a reporter for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. He is the author of the book “Hannibal and me”.