Vaccines for cancer and heart disease ready by 2030, Moderna chief says | health

Vaccines against cancer and heart disease could be ready by the end of the decade, according to Moderna’s chief executive.

Dr Paul Burton said breakthroughs in the field of mRNA – the technology used to make his company’s flagship Covid shot – ushered in a golden age of vaccines.

He predicts that by 2030 there will be vaccines for ‘all sorts’ of incurable conditions, saving ‘hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives.’

Early studies have already shown ‘tremendous promise’, he said. But they won’t be your typical vaccine — they’ll be highly personalized and expensive.

Heart disease and cancer are the biggest killers in the US, accounting for 1.3 million deaths annually – or more than one in three of all recorded deaths.

Dr Paul Burton, chief executive of the vaccine maker, told The Guardian: ‘We have that vaccine and it’s going to be highly effective and it’s going to save millions of lives.

‘I hope we will be able to provide personalized cancer vaccines against different types of tumors to people around the world.’

He said: ‘What we’ve learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases or for Covid, now there’s evidence that that’s absolutely not the case.

It can be applied to all types of disease areas; We are in cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, rare diseases.

‘We’ve studied all of those areas and they’ve all shown tremendous promise.’

Dr Burton did not say how the vaccines work, but previous studies have shown how mRNA can be used to fight cancer.

MRNA vaccines work by instructing cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response against a specific pathogen, such as Covid.