As a result, the UK government has signed two partnerships: a capacity to provide personalized cancer treatments with Biontech to 10,000 patients by 2030, and a 10-year investment in the Innovation and Technology Centre with up to 250 million vaccines. Stars aligned.
During the pandemic, clinical trials have been opened in the UK for a few weeks. But before it took years to complete clinical trials. What has changed?
This is really fascinating because over the years we thought research was slow in nature. It took 20 years to get the drug on the market. Unfortunately, most cancer patients will succumb when the drug is on the market. We show the world that if you modernize the process, run the process in parallel and use digital tools, it can be done in one year.
Of course, opening clinical trials during a pandemic is not necessarily the same as clinical trials for cancer. But you have a breakthrough moment in your early stage cancer vaccine program.
Biontech conducted a trial called BNT122, which was not the case with people with high risk of bowel cancer worldwide. So when we announced the cancer vaccine launch pad, the UK cancer community seized the opportunity. We opened the trial at the University Hospital of Birmingham, which was the most surprising thing for me, as it was not the leading cancer vaccine research center.
We need to have 10,000 patients on the trial and we get there within three months. It’s so amazing. It just shows that because we are a healthcare system, we can be much faster than any other country.
Dominoes began to drop quickly on the back of this success: we opened a head and neck cancer trial in Liverpool, an esophageal and gastric cancer trial in Dundee and a lung cancer trial in London. We started building a community of people who were all pushing for people who were launching cancer vaccine trials as soon as possible.
Several mRNA-based cancer vaccines are in international advanced clinical trials, and the UK is currently conducting 15 cancer vaccine trials. When will we see the first approved mRNA cancer vaccine?
We have a trial to prevent skin cancer from reappearing after removal. It’s now done. Like every trial we conducted, we were once again overapplying and the trial was one year ahead of schedule. In cancer trials, this is completely unheard of because they usually last longer.
What will happen now is that over the next six to twelve months, we will monitor people in the trial and differ between people who receive cancer vaccines and those who do not. We hope it may start by the end of 2026. If successful, we will invent the first approved personalized mRNA vaccine within five years of our first licensed mRNA vaccine for COVID. This is really impressive.
Listen to Lennard Lee on Wired Health in Kings Square, London on March 18. Get tickets on health.wired.com.
