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Moderna, the pharmaceutical company, has revealed that it will soon be able to provide new groundbreaking vaccines.

As reported by The Guardian, jabs for conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases are said to be available by as early as 2030.

Covid sped things up

Moderna's chief medical officer Paul Burton said he believes that the firm can offer treatments for a variety of diseases "in as little as five years", according to The Guardian.

According to experts, the success of Covid-19 vaccines helped to advance research and development, particularly with regards to mRNA treatments.

It shortened what was once 15 years of progress into just 12 to 18 months.

Burton said:

"I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 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.”

How it is designed to work

There's a whole lot of science behind how the vaccine is said to combat cancer, but here's a simplified version.

As simplified as it can be, anyway.

According to Burton, mRNA-based cancer vaccines will be created for "multiple different tumour types".

mRNA, short for messenger ribonucleic acid, helps living cells make protein.

Doctors will take a sample of the patient's tumour and identify its genetic mutations.

"A machine learning algorithm then identifies which of these mutations are responsible for driving the cancer’s growth," explained The Guardian.

It also identifies abnormal protein in cancer cells that have a high probability of triggering an immune response.

Doctors then create and inject mRNA that will instruct cells to produce more of such protein.

This raises a red flag to the body's immune system, saying, "Hey, there's cancer here. Destroy it."

Since these particular protein fragments are only found on the cancer cells, healthy cells will be spared.

Reported results

Moderna has been reportedly making progress in mRNA vaccines.

"In January 2023, Moderna announced results from a late-stage trial of its experimental mRNA vaccine for RSV, suggesting it was 83.7 per cent effective at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in adults aged 60 and older," said The Guardian.

This earned the vaccine a breakthrough therapy designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Based on recent results in patients with the skin cancer melanoma, the same designation was given to Moderna’s cancer vaccine a month later.

"We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives," said Burton.

Top images via John Cameron and Nappy