Cancer Vaccine by 2030?

Earlier this week, I saw a whole bunch of news stories about a possible cancer vaccine being available by 2030. I'm skeptical. (But that's just how I am.)

I'm actually less skeptical the more I think about it.

The vaccine possibility came during an interview with Dr. Ozlem Tureci and Dr. Ugur Sahin, the married researchers who founded BioNTech, the company that created an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine with Pfizer.  

I'm skeptical because I'm always skeptical by anyone who claims they might find "a cure for cancer," as if cancer were one disease. It's certainly not -- even Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma isn't a single disease, and has up to 80 subtypes. And even within a single type of cancer, the pathways that cancer cells use to stay alive, and the microenvironment factors that they take advantage of to grow -- it's all just mind-blowing to think about. Cancer cells find a way to avoid treatment, to come back from treatment, and to find new ways around treatment. Finding one way to stop a cancer cell is a very difficult task. Finding one way to stop ALL cancer cells, no matter the type, just seems impossible. 

And yet....

Apparently, Drs. Tureci and Sahin were originally working on an individualized cancer vaccine when their mRNA technology was needed for Covid. Now they're back to the cancer vaccine.

It is individualized, something like CAR-T. As they describe it, after surgery to remove a tumor, the patient would receive a vaccine that recognizes the cancer cells. It uses T cells (like CAR-T) to scan the body for cancer cells and eliminate them. Like CAR-T, in theory, the T cells will have a memory so that if the cancer cells come around again, the T cells will find them.

It's an interesting concept, and to me, the fact that it is individualized is what makes me slightly less skeptical than I would be about some other "cures for cancer."

And, of course, it's important to go beyond the headline and look a little closer. Lots of stories have "cure" in their headline to catch people's attention, but a quote from the interview is important:

"Yes, we feel that a cure for cancer, or to changing cancer patients' lives, is in our grasp," said Professor Ozlem Tureci during an interview on BBC's "Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg."

A cure for cancer OR changing cancer patients' lives? That leaves open some possibilities. A treatment that knocks back a previously incurable cancer will "change cancer patients' lives." So will a treatment that doesn't cure it, but does control it to the point where it becomes a chronic disease. So will a treatment that greatly extends a patient's life after a disease becomes refractory, extending survival for years instead of months, which is often the case now.

So I remain skeptical of any treatment that claims to be a cure for cancer -- or skeptical of any headline that makes that claim. Especially a treatment that's essentially an idea. I'll be less skeptical when it's tested in a lab, and then in a phase 1 trial, and a phase 2 trial -- you understand what I mean.

But that doesn't mean I won't be keeping an eye on this. 

(It also means I fully expect to be around in 8 years to see if they were right. Expect a blog post either way. I have a good memory for these things.)