Will the mRNA Cancer Vaccine Be the End of Cancer?

The mRNA vaccine, which first showed its hand during the COVID pandemic, is now being pinned high hopes for solving cancer. The American drugmaker Moderna is ambitiously developing vaccines against a variety of cancers and other diseases, and claims results within five years. Moderna's chief medical officer, Burton, told Britain's The Guardian that he is confident that by 2030 mRNA vaccines against cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases and other conditions will be on the market, and that his own Moderna could provide such vaccines as early as five years from now.

So, will the mRNA cancer vaccine be the end of cancer? I doubt it. The mRNA cancer vaccine will, like today's immunotherapy and targeted therapy, become one of many novel cancer prevention and treatment options, but the clinical data for these high-tech modern-biology products will not look very good, and their effect will be very limited. The results of the medical-technology research we are currently doing from the perspective of gene mutations are all limited: a few patients benefit, while most suffer.

In the fight against COVID-19, the various vaccines humans developed, including mRNA vaccines, also played only a limited role. We are completely unable to stop the virus's continuous evolution; some experts even believe that the various measures humans took actually promoted the rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2, making it harder and harder to prevent. Cancer cells also have a strong ability to evolve. If the mRNA vaccine could not stop the evolution of the coronavirus, on what grounds could it stop the evolution of cancer cells?

Moreover, cancer is a complex disease caused by multiple factors; what triggers cancer may be a problem of the whole genome rather than a single gene mutation. Repairing one mutated gene does not solve cancer once and for all. The various environmental events a multicellular organism encounters throughout its life cycle all exert a profound influence on the occurrence and development of cancer; these are problems a single mRNA vaccine cannot solve.

So we need not rush to cheer for the mRNA cancer vaccine. Whether it will truly bring good news to humanity after it comes out remains to be verified by time. Perhaps for a complex disease like cancer, the cocktail-therapy idea is the most realistic life-prolonging strategy. Using complex methods to deal with a complex disease is the most logical approach.