We didn’t know until, we opened the news pages this morning that a husband and wife team created BioNTech. The German professors formed their enterprise in 2008, to explore using messenger mRNA technology to treat Cancer. However, they diverted their attention when COVID arrived, and partnered with Pfizer to develop a vaccine against that virus. But now they are wondering if Cancer could benefit from COVID-19 knowledge they gained during the pandemic.
How Cancer Could Benefit from COVID-19 mRNA Technology
Messenger mRNA contains an information blueprint enabling our bodies to make a particular protein. In the COVID-19 context, this is a small piece of protein corresponding to the outer membrane of the virus. This trains our immune system to identify the foreign agent, attack it, and destroy it. So when the actual virus arrives, it knows how to deal with that too.
This technology is at the core of Pfizer-BioNTech and other COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Now BBC News Health reveals Professors Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci are also trialing it to treat melanoma, bowel cancer and other tumor types. There are several projects in progress, including one where patients receive a ‘personalized vaccine’.
Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine technology sends an instruction, or blueprint to cells to produce a specific antigen or protein. With COVID, this is part of the spike protein of the virus. However, in the case of cancer, this is a marker on the surface of a tumor cell.
More About These Markers on Tumor Cells
A tumor marker is like a unique identification card for a particular cancer. It tells scientists how aggressive it is, what kind of treatment it may respond to, or how it is reacting to treatment. National Cancer Institute informs us these markers are in blood, urine, stool, tumors, and other tissues, or bodily fluids of some patients with cancer.
In theory, this is how Cancer could benefit from COVID-19 technology. Vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech were the first to prove this method could work in practice. Although BioNTech’s mRNA Cancer trials actually started long before the pandemic, and are showing encouraging signs.
“Every step, every patient we treat in our cancer trials helps us to find out more about what we are against, and how to address that,” one of the partners explains. “As scientists, we are always hesitant to say we will have a cure for cancer. But we have a number of breakthroughs, and we will continue to work on them.”
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