Terrible news for anti-vaxxers – the dreaded mRNA vaccines are penetrating new areas of healthcare, being deployed as treatment for cancer now.
Will all of the hysterics swear them off this time too? It's going to be an interesting spectacle to watch.
In the meantime, details: a lung cancer patient at University College London Hospitals was the first person to receive a novel mRNA cancer vaccine produced by German BioNTech, the very same lab responsible for Pfizer's Covid-19 jab.
In a mechanism similar to the one used in fighting the coronavirus, the vaccine is supposed to prime the immune system to identify cancer cells and mobilise to fight them.
"The investigational mRNA cancer immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer utilises a messenger RNA (mRNA) to present common tumour markers to the patient’s immune system, with the aim of helping it recognise and fight cancer cells expressing these markers."
In fact, cancer treatment was one of the primary targets for mRNA technology during its decades-long development, and the global pandemic merely provided an opportunity to deploy the technology to fight the novel virus.
Today, with the worst over, researchers are back to focusing on truly deadly, civilisational diseases.
A total of 130 patients at various stages of the disease have been selected for the trial in seven countries, with thousands more expected to take part in the next few years.
