New mRNA vaccines could be a critical tool to fight cancer. But their future is up in the air

Physicians have been working to treat and study cancer since the days of ancient Egypt. More than 5,000 years later, major progress has been made to treat the disease but scientists still haven’t found a cure. With the introduction of mRNA vaccines in the 2010s – vaccines that use messenger RNA molecules in cells to train the body to fight dangerous invaders – doctors found a promising new tool in the fight against the disease. Now some say they’ve gotten a step closer to stopping cancer in its tracks.A recent clinical trial using an mRNA vaccine helped to greatly extend the lives of people with pancreatic cancer and a new study shows researchers can trigger cancer-killing responses in more than one way. Last summer, researchers said their mRNA vaccine boosted the effects of tumor-fighting drugs, bringing them closer to developing a universal vaccine that triggers the immune system against cancer.All of this could already help to save lives, according to experts. There are 626,140 deaths from cancer in the U.S. projected this year, as well as 2.1 million new cases, according to the American Cancer Society.A cancer patient receives a Covid vaccine in Louisville, Kentucky, in April 2021. The Covid vaccine was the first mRNA vaccine to be fully approved by government regulators. Now, new cancer mRNA vaccines show similar promise - but research efforts might face financial hurdles (Getty Images)“It’s exciting,” Elizabeth Jaffee, deputy director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, told CNN Digital. “There’s been a number of successes in early-stage, positive trials.”Actions speak louder than wordsThe success of mRNA vaccines has also shifted funding toward the field once again. The Trump administration had canceled $500 million in vaccine development last August – drawing swift outcry from doctors who said the decision would threaten lives. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said the action was aimed at “shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts and acted,” he said in a statement on winding down vaccine development, saying that the data supported this decision and falsely claiming the vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu.”Bill Hanage, an epidemiology professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called Kennedy’s remarks “nonsense.”“The vaccines that we had available in this country against Covid were mRNA vaccines, vaccines that have saved millions of lives in the U.S. alone over the last few years, and many more worldwide,” he said in a release.When asked about the decision, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday that the decision was monetary.“We just felt like it should be the companies ... that should be funding their own research. Not taxpayer dollars,” he said, adding that some of the funding had shifted to developing a universal flu vaccine.Still, the Department of Health and Human Service has recently taken steps to fund cancer vaccines. The department’s National Cancer Institute is funding a $200 million public-private partnership toward trials of vaccines that initiate an immune response on tumors, according to a March report from The Wall Street Journal.“What’s exciting about this is that there are early signals from clinical trials that we can actually have an impact even in some very difficult settings where we have very little to offer patients,” Dr. Anthony Letai, who became NCI director in September, told the paper.“HHS sees promise in mRNA technology for recurrence of hard-to-treat cancers, and Secretary Kennedy recently committed the National Cancer Institute at NIH to a public-private partnership to invest in research and clinical trials,” Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told The Independent.She repeated Kennedy’s messaging that HHS had wound down its investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses “because they do not protect effectively against infections from mutating strain of viruses such as Covid and flu.”“Also, these companies had already been massively subsidized by the government, and we decided to reinvest the money in other more promising technologies,” said Hilliard.Some 626,140 deaths from cancer in the U.S. are projected this year, as well as 2.1 million new cases, according to the American Cancer Society (AFP via Getty Images)Show me the moneySo, what’s next? Moderna is currently conducting a trial of its mRNA vaccine on patients with high-risk melanoma and other U.S. trials are recruiting patients with lung cancer and melanoma.But clinical research is expensive and there needs to be more funding for mRNA cancer vaccines to launch trials, too, Dr. Nora Disis, the Director of the Cancer Vaccine Institute, urged. “$200 million will go fast without a clear strategy … Operation Warp Speed spent $12 billion on the research, development and manufacture of Covid-19 vaccines. Here we are talking $200 million for all cancer vaccines,” she wrote in The Lancet Oncology medical journal. “It is a start, but we need more investment.”