But look again at some of these new vaccines. And then think of the dawn of dawn – not only the first rays of the coming months, but also the bright light of future years and decades. It seems increasingly plausible that the same weapons we will use to defeat Covid-19 could defeat even weaker maggots – including cancer, which kills nearly 10 million people annually.
The most promising Covid vaccines use nucleic acids called messenger RNA, or mRNA. The one vaccine comes from the German firm BioNTech SE and its American partner Pfizer Inc. The other vaccine is from the American company Moderna Inc. (the original spelling was ModeRNA, the prescription is MRNA). Another one is on its way from CureVac NV, also in Germany.
Ordinary vaccines tend to be inactivated or attenuated viruses that, when injected into the body, stimulate an immune response that can later protect against the living pathogen. But the process of making such vaccines requires different chemicals and cell cultures. It takes time and provides opportunities for pollution.
mRNA vaccines do not have these problems. They instruct the body to make the offensive proteins – in this case those that turn the viral RNA of SARS-CoV-2. The immune system then uses 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 proteins we want. It includes the antigens of many other diseases besides Covid-19.
In its daily function, mRNA takes instructions from its molecular cousin, the DNA in our cell nuclei. Elements of the genome are copied, carrying the mRNA into the cytoplasm, where small cellular factories, ribosomes, use the information to cut out proteins.
BioNTech and Moderna are taking a shortcut by skipping the whole unnecessary business at the core with the DNA. Instead, they first have to figure out what protein they want – for example, a peak on the coat around a virus. Then they look at the sequence of amino acids that make up this protein. From this they deduce the exact instructions that the mRNA should give.
This process can be relatively quick, so it took less than a year to make the vaccines, a pace that was previously unimaginable. It is also genetically safe – mRNA cannot re-enter the nucleus and accidentally insert genes into our DNA.
Researchers have had the idea since the 1970s that you can use this technique to fight all kinds of diseases. But as usual in science, you need a lot of money, time and patience to solve all the interim problems. After a decade of enthusiasm, mRNA became academically illegal in the 1990s. Progress seems to be coming to a halt. The biggest obstacle was that injection of mRNA into animals often caused fatal inflammation.
Enter Katalin Kariko – A Hungarian scientist who emigrated to the US in the 1980s and heroically devoted her entire career to mRNA by going up and down. In the nineties she loses her money, they are demoted, she gets salary reduction and she also gets other setbacks. But she stuck to it. And when she herself struggled with cancer, she made the decisive breakthrough.
In the 2000s, she and her research partner realized that the exchange of uridine, one of mRNA’s ‘letters’, could cause inflammation without otherwise losing 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 and co-founder of BioNTech. They licensed Kariko’s technology and hired her. They were very interested in curing cancer from the beginning.
Today’s weapons against cancer will one day look like a primitive idea like a flint in an operating room. To kill a malignant tumor, you usually close it with radiation or chemicals, which damage many other tissues in the process.
The better way to fight cancer, Sahin and Tureci realized, is to treat each tumor as genetically unique and to train the immune systems of individual patients against that particular enemy. A perfect job for mRNA. You find the antigen, get his fingerprint, make the cellular instructions to target the culprit and let the body do the rest.
Check out the pipelines from Moderna and BioNTech. It contains drug trials for the treatment of cancers of the breast, prostate, skin, pancreas, brain, lung and other tissues, as well as vaccinations against everything from flu to Zika and rabies. The outlook looks good.
Admittedly, progress is slow. Part of the explanation given by Sahin and Tureci is that investors in this sector have to raise a lot of capital and then have to wait longer than a decade, first for the trials and then for approval by regulations. In the past, too little was in the mood.
Covid-19, crossed with the fingers, may turbocharge all these processes. The pandemic led to a major debut of mRNA vaccines and their definitive proof of concept. There is already a murmur about a Nobel Prize for Kariko. From now on, mRNA will have no problems getting money, attention or enthusiasm – from investors, regulators and policymakers.
This does not mean that the last piece will be easy. But in this dark hour it is permissible to bake in the light that is dawning.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editors or Bloomberg MP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He is the author of ‘Hannibal and Me’.