Cancer vaccines

Interviewer: Professor Elias Sayour, thank you very much for your time today. We're here to talk about mRNA vaccines for cancer. Now mRNA vaccines gained significant recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to their rapid development, their high precision, and their robust effectiveness. Now in cancer treatment, mRNA vaccines offer several key advantages over traditional therapies but their full potential is yet to be realized. Just to set the scene, my first question would be how has the success of mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 influenced the development of mRNA vaccines for cancer treatment? What are the key differences between these two applications? Dr. Sayour: Thank you for having me here today to speak about this. There are several answers to these questions. One is the SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 pandemic absolutely turbocharged enthusiasm and allowed us to learn a lot about how to commercialize RNA products for a myriad of applications including cancer treatment. Now in response to your second question, there are key differences between making a vaccine for an infectious disease and making a vaccine in the cancer setting. One of the biggest differences of course is when we talk about cancer vaccines or therapeutic cancer vaccines, it's an oxymoron. Vaccines are designed to prevent something from happening before it happens. In the context of cancer, it's already there. It's already happened.