Israeli scientists use COVID-19 vaccine to fight cancer

For more than a decade, scientists have dreamed about the seemingly endless possibilities of messenger RNA (mRNA).

Now, the world is likely to have two anti-coronavirus vaccines based on mRNA technology to help slow the aggressive pandemic that has killed 1.4 million people.

In Israel, researchers at Tel Aviv University are using a similar technology as Pfizer and Moderna to target cancer cells and genetically neutralize them, increasing overall survival rate.

“Cancer genes are responsible for the proliferation of cancer cells,” Peer said. “We want to cut those genes, so that they will not be active anymore and they will destroy the cancer cells forever.”

But he said that the challenge has been to deliver those “scissors” into the right cells without touching healthy cells – “you don’t want to edit the genome of a healthy cell and kill it.”

In this most recent experiment, the research team targeted two types of cancer: glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain cancer, with a life expectancy of 15 months since diagnosis and a five-year survival rate of only 3%; and metastatic ovarian cancer, a major cause of death among women and the most lethal cancer of the female reproductive system.

The researchers demonstrated that a single treatment doubled the average life expectancy of mice with glioblastoma tumors, improving their overall survival rate by about 30%. At the same time, it increased overall survival rate by 80% in a metastatic ovarian cancer mice model.

 “It must be emphasized that this is not chemotherapy. There are no side effects, and a cancer cell treated in this way will never become active again. The molecular scissors of Cas9 cut the cancer cell’s DNA, thereby neutralizing it and permanently preventing replication.”

Cancer research is still in its infancy. However, “by demonstrating its potential in treating two aggressive cancers, the technology opens numerous new possibilities for treating other types of cancer as well as rare genetic diseases and chronic viral diseases such as AIDS.”

Human trials are expected to start within the next 18 months to three years.

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