April 11, 2023 – Vaccines against the world's deadliest diseases, reminiscent of cancer and heart disease, are expected to be available by 2030 and will save tens of millions of lives, in response to the chief medical officer of one among the world's leading pharmaceutical firms.
The announcement is one other sign of what many are calling a “golden age” of vaccine development, largely attributed to using mRNA technology to develop COVID-19 vaccines in the course of the pandemic.
“I think what we've learned over the last few months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases or just for COVID, the evidence now shows that's absolutely not the case,” Paul Burton, MD, PhD, Moderna's chief medical officer, told The guard“It can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we're in cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases and rare diseases. We have studies in all of these areas and they've all shown tremendous potential.”
The FDA recently designated two recent Moderna vaccines as breakthrough therapies: a shot that stops respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in older people and a shot that stops the reoccurrence of melanoma, a deadly skin cancer. The FDA grants breakthrough therapy designation when the outcomes of a brand new treatment in early trials are substantially higher than those of an existing therapy.
mRNA vaccine technology, which made headlines for its role in COVID-19 vaccines, works by teaching the body to make a selected protein to assist the immune system prevent or fight a specific disease.
Burton believes mRNA technology will result in breakthroughs, reminiscent of a cancer vaccine that will be personalized based on the characteristics of a specific tumor.
“I think we're going to have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously untreatable with drugs, and I think in 10 years we're getting closer to a world where you can actually identify the genetic cause of a disease and use mRNA-based technology to work it out and fix it relatively easily,” he said.
The Moderna manager made these statements ahead of today’s annual To update on its vaccine pipeline projects, which it calls “Vaccines Day.” The Massachusetts-based drugmaker said it had given the primary dose of a “next-generation” COVID-19 vaccine to someone in a Phase III trial, made progress on a shot against Lyme disease and is developing a vaccine against the highly contagious norovirus, which causes vomiting and diarrhea.
In total, Moderna expects “six major vaccine launches” in the subsequent few years, the corporate said in a press release. It expects the marketplace for COVID-19 booster shots alone to be price $15 billion.