Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer Vaccines

So the UK government signed two partnerships: one with BioNTech to provide 10,000 patients with access to personalized cancer treatments by 2030, and a 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovation and technology center with capacity to produce up to 250 million vaccines. The stars were aligned.

During the pandemic, the UK was opening clinical trials in a matter of a few weeks. But before it used to take years to complete a clinical trial. What changed?

It was really fascinating, because for many years, we believed that research is inherently slow. It used to take 20 years to get a drug to market. Most cancer patients, unfortunately, will succumb by the time a drug gets to market. We showed the world that it could be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the process in parallel, and use digital tools.

Of course, opening a clinical trial during a pandemic is not necessarily the same as a clinical trial for cancer. But you had a breakthrough moment for the cancer vaccine project at an early stage.

There was a trial run by BioNTech, called BNT122, on people with high-risk bowel cancer, which was not recruiting very well across the world. So when we announced the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, the UK cancer community took that opportunity. We opened that trial at Birmingham University Hospital, which was the most surprising thing for me, because it is not a leading cancer vaccine studies center.

We needed to get 10,000 patients enrolled in the trial, and we got there within the course of three months. It was quite amazing. It just goes to show that because we’re a single health care system, we can do this much quicker than any other country.

The dominoes started falling very quickly on the back of that success: we opened a head and neck cancer trial in Liverpool, an esophageal and gastric cancer trial in Dundee, and a lung cancer trial in London. We started to create a community of people who were all pushing for launching cancer vaccine trials as quickly as possible.

Several mRNA-based cancer vaccines are in late-stage clinical trials internationally, and the UK is currently running 15 cancer-vaccine trials. When will we see the first approved mRNA cancer vaccine?

We have a trial to stop skin cancer coming back after you cut it out. It’s now completed. We over-recruited again, just like every single one of the trials that we ran, and the trial finished one year ahead of schedule. That’s completely unheard of in cancer trials because they normally run over-long.

What will happen now is that, over the next six to 12 months, we will monitor the people in the trial and work out if there’s a difference between the people who took the cancer vaccine and the ones who didn’t. We’re hoping to have results by the end of the year or beginning of 2026. If it’s successful, we will have invented the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine, within only five years of the first licensed mRNA vaccine for Covid. That’s pretty impressive.

Hear Lennard Lee speak at WIRED Health on March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at health.wired.com.