The future of treatments

Following on from their recent success, Moderna has announced its intention to deliver vaccines for life threatening conditions including cancer and heart disease

During the pandemic, unprecedented innovations condensed fi een years of progress into eighteen months, according to researchers. The speed of advancements in vaccine technology over the past two years has kickstarted a chain reaction of innovation. Pfizer is in the late stages of clinical trials for a flu vaccine and has entered a partnership with BioNTech to develop a shingles vaccine.

“There has been a massive acceleration, not just of traditional vaccine technologies, but also novel ones that hadn’t previously been taken through licensure. Certainly, mRNA falls into that category,” says Dr Filip Dubovsky, President of Research and Development

For decades a global e ort has been made to diagnose and treat malaria. In addition, public health programmes have been in place to educate people on prevention methods, including bed-nets, insecticides and safe water management.

Both Azerbaijan and Tajikistan have also introduced Mosquito Fish, which feed o the larvae of mosquitoes. These fish have been widely used across most modern mosquito control programmes. create proteins, the injection of synthetic forms uses a spike protein to cover the surface of a virus, enabling the body’s cells to generate spike copies, training the immune system to defend against disease and infections. for Novavax, who are developing a new generation of protein based vaccines.

“The people and governments of Azerbaijan and Tajikistan have worked long and hard to eliminate malaria,” says Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organisation.

In order for a nation to be deemed free of malaria, there has to be a minimum of three consecutive years with no local transmissions and comprehensive systems must be in place to detect and address any future transmission.

According to the WHO Azerbaijan last reported a locally transmitted case in 2012, and Tajikistan reported the last locally transmitted case in 2014.

“Their accomplishment is further proof that, with the right resources and political commitment, eliminating malaria is possible,” Dr Tedros adds.

In the meantime,Ghana is the first country to licence the lR21/Matrix-M vaccine for use in children aged 36 months to five years. Marking the culmination of 30 years malaria vaccine research at Oxford University, the vaccine can be manufactured at mass scale and modest cost, enabling hundreds of millions of doses to be supplied to African countries.

In 2021 Moderna released the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, and has since been continuing its development of mRNA vaccines to save millions of lives worldwide.

“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that ten years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology,” says Dr Paul Burton, chief medical o icer of Moderna.

The mRNA molecule encourages cells to

Moderna is designing personalised mRNA cancer vaccines for each type of tumour, which will act as an alarm, alerting the body to existing cancer cells, which are already growing. The protein fragments, which are only present on the surface of cancerous cells, are identified, triggering an immune response. A biopsy is taken from the tumour in order for sequencing of the genetic material to take place, identifying cancerous mutations.

“[mRNA] can be applied to all sorts of disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare diseases, we have studies in all of these areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.” Burton adds.

With a release date of 2030, Moderna is encouraged by the developments made over the past three years, however there are concerns that distractions could damage any further progress. For these revolutionary scientific innovations to be made, it is essential that high level investments are maintained and secure.