Will the Covid crisis speed medical advances?

For decades, scientists have dreamed about the possibilities of using messenger ribonucleuc acid -otherwise known as mRNA- to treat some of the world’s deadliest diseases, reports Olivia Gavoyannis. 

The theory behind their hopes was a solid one. In the natural world, the body relies on millions of proteins to keep itself alive, and it uses mRNA to tell cells which proteins to make. So, the idea was, if scientists worked out how to manipulate the body’s mRNA, they could create any protein they wanted – to fight infection, mend damaged tissue or reverse a rare disease.

But for a long time, success was elusive. Katalin Karikó, one of the earliest mRNA pioneers, was first exposed to the idea as an undergraduate student in 1976. She began a PhD, studying how mRNA might be used to target viruses, but her first real moment of hope came when scientists found a way to generate mRNA from scratch in 1989.

She told WIRED: “Suddenly we felt like we could do anything” –  and more than twenty years later, scientists are having this epiphany all over again.

In normal times, it can take anything from a few years to decades to produce a vaccine. But the funding and urgency of the Covid pandemic helped the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna teams to harness the power of mRNA technology to create safe, effective vaccines for the virus in less than a year.

The rapid pace of the innovation has sparked hope about what else the technology could be used for.

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the co-founders behind the BioNTech, gave a TED talk explaining how mRNA vaccines could be used to target a specific issue within the body without inhibiting the whole immune system like the current treatments do – and even be tailored to target an individual’s specific tumour.

They said: “The development of the coronavirus mRNA vaccine shows the power of the mRNA and it shows also the safety of this approach… it opens up a door for new technology and for new types of treatments.”

And these new therapies might not be too far around the corner. Currently, several phase one and phase two clinical trials are either underway or recruiting participants to assess the efficacy, tolerability, and safety of therapeutic mRNA vaccines to treat various forms of cancer. These include melanoma, non-small cell lung cancers, gastrointestinal cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and pancreatic cancer, among others.

There is also hope that mRNA vaccines could be used to treat Alzheimer’s, the leading cause of dementia. Scientists are still unsure what causes the phenomenon, but there is growing evidence to suggest that mRNA vaccines generate a systemic immune response that can reduce inflammation in the brain, combatting neuron loss and cognitive decline.

As Kate Bingham, the former head of the UK Vaccine Taskforce told Reaction: “Immunology is the fundamental basis of how we are going to change medicine around the world”.

She argued that the pandemic could shift medicine from a model of cure to one of prevention and she speculated that there could be a world in which people in their middle age were given vaccinations against the top five cancers at their routine check-up, because “we will know enough about the drivers or markers of those different cancers such that we can induce your immune response to be on special lookout for those ones.”

At the moment, this is only blue-sky thinking. But it is heartening to think that the pandemic, for all its pain and suffering, has driven the kind of innovation that could – in the not-so-distant future – revolutionise the way that healthcare is administered around the world. 

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Olivia Gavoyannis,
Reaction Reporter