But take a look at some of these new vaccines. And then think about the upcoming dawn – not only the first rays in the months to come, but the bright light of future years and decades as well. It seems increasingly likely that the same weapons we’ll be using to defeat Covid-19 can defeat grimmer reapers – including cancer, which kills nearly 10 million people a year.
The most promising Covid vaccines use nucleic acids called messenger RNA or mRNA. One vaccine comes from the German company BioNTech SE and its American partner Pfizer Inc. The other is from the American company Moderna Inc. (the original spelling was ModeRNA, the ticker is MRNA). Another is on the way from CureVac NV, also based in Germany.
Regular vaccines are usually inactivated or attenuated viruses that, when injected into the body, stimulate an immune response that can later protect against the live pathogen. But making such vaccines requires different chemicals and cell cultures. This takes time and offers chances of contamination.
mRNA vaccines do not have these problems. They instruct the body itself to make the offending proteins – in this case, the proteins that wrap around the SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA. The immune system then settles on these antigens and exercises for the day when the same proteins appear with the coronavirus attached to them.
Therein lies the greater promise of mRNA: It can tell our cells to make any protein we want. That includes the antigens of many other diseases besides Covid-19.
In its day-to-day function, mRNA takes instructions from its molecular cousin, the DNA in our cell nuclei. Pieces of the genome are copied, which carries the mRNA to the cytoplasm, where small cellular factories called ribosomes use the information to produce proteins.
BioNTech and Moderna shorten this process by skipping all the awkward things in the core with the DNA. Instead, they first figure out what protein they want, such as a spike in the coat around a virus. Then they look at the sequence of amino acids that makes this protein. From this they deduce the precise instructions that the mRNA must give.
This process can be relatively quick, so it took less than a year to make the vaccines, a pace previously unimaginable. It’s also genetically safe – mRNA can’t get back to the nucleus and accidentally insert genes into our DNA.
Researchers since the 1970s have suspected that you can use this technique to treat all kinds of ailments. But as usual in science, you need enormous amounts of money, time, and patience to solve all the intervening problems. After a decade of enthusiasm, mRNA fell academically out of fashion in the 1990s. Progress seemed to stand still. The main obstacle was that injecting mRNA in animals often caused fatal inflammation.
Enter Katalin Kariko – a Hungarian scientist who immigrated to the US in the 1980s and has heroically devoted her entire career to mRNA through his ups and downs. In the 1990s, she lost her funding, was demoted, got a pay cut, and faced other setbacks. But she stuck with it. And then, after battling cancer herself, she broke through the crucial one.
In the 2000s, she and her research partner realized that exchanging uridine, one of the “letters” of mRNA, did not cause inflammation without otherwise compromising the code. The mice survived.
Her study was read by a Stanford University scientist, Derrick Rossi, who later co-founded Moderna. It also came to the attention of Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, two male and female oncologists who are co-founders of BioNTech. They licensed and hired Kariko’s technology. From the start, they were most interested in curing cancer.
Today’s anti-cancer weapons will one day seem as primitive an idea as flint axes in an operating theater. To kill a malignant tumor, you usually zap it with radiation or chemicals, damaging a lot of other tissue.
The better way to fight cancer, Sahin and Tureci realized, is to treat each tumor as genetically unique and train individual patients’ immune systems against that particular enemy. A perfect job for mRNA. You find the antigen, get its fingerprint, reverse engineer the cellular instructions to attack the culprit, and let the body do the rest.
Check out the Moderna and BioNTech pipelines. They include drug trials to treat cancers of the breast, prostate, skin, pancreas, brain, lung and other tissues, as well as vaccines for everything from influenza to Zika and rabies. The outlook appears good.
Progress is admittedly slow. Part of the explanation that Sahin and Tureci are making is that investors in this sector must deposit heaps of capital and then wait more than a decade, first for the trials and then for regulatory approval. In the past, there were too few in the mood.
Covid-19, fingers crossed, can turbo charge all these processes. The pandemic has led to a grand debut of mRNA vaccines and their definitive proof of concept. There are already rumors about a Nobel Prize for Kariko. From now on, mRNA will easily receive money, attention or enthusiasm – from investors, regulators and policymakers.
That doesn’t mean the last stretch will be easy. But in this dark hour it is permissible to bask in the light that rises.
This column does not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. He is the author of ‘Hannibal and Me.’