The First Approved COVID-19 Vaccines: The Road to Cancer Vaccines

Abstract

In the past decade, mRNA vaccines have been highly discussed as a promising therapy for cancer. With the pandemic of COVID-19, some researchers redirected their studies to the development of a new vaccine for COVID-19 due to the urgent need. With the pandemic’s deceleration due to the vaccines’ success, the research and development of mRNA vaccines have turned to cancer again. Considering the new evidence and results generated by the vaccination of millions of people with mRNA vaccines, this article intends to provide a perspective on how the results from COVID-19 vaccination could now provide new insights for the development of an mRNA cancer vaccine. Many lessons were learned, and new evidence is available to re-focus and enhance the potential of the mRNA technology to cancer. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s mRNA technologies, and their significant advancements, allowed mRNA to overcome many of the challenges and blockers related to this platform in the past, now providing a new breadth of hope on using the mRNA technology to treat many diseases, namely cancer. This study also reports a better understanding of how it was possible to boost an accelerated development process of COVID-19 vaccines from a regulatory point of view. It is also relevant to consider other synergies and factors that contributed to gathering all the conditions ensuring the development of these vaccines in such a short period. Suppose the same efforts from all stakeholders could be applied to the development of new cancer vaccines, aligned now with the new scientific evidence generated from the current mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. In that case, mRNA cancer vaccines are near, and a new era for cancer treatment is about to begin.

Peptosome: A New Efficient Transfection Tool as an Alternative to Liposome

“…The most important problem for gene therapy is the lack of an effective and safe gene delivery system that can be used both in vitro and in vivo. DNA and RNA vaccines, which require gene delivery, have recently become important tools for protecting against infections and treating cancer [35,36].…”

The First Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic (PBPK) Model for an Oral Vaccine Using Alpha-Tocopherol as an Adjuvant

“…Additionally, it has been seen as an endorsement of new technologies and the development of stronger cooperation amongst many stakeholders to build relevant guidelines and to gather conditions for an optimal vaccine development path that could lead to success [ 3 , 4 ]. In addition to the above, vaccines are also seen as a new hope for oncology and other rare diseases while they are still the most valuable resource to prevent infectious diseases [ 5 ].…”