Vaccine f irm eyes cancer magic bullet

The idea that we could use a vaccine to defeat cancer is not, says Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech, a new one. ‘‘We have had this thought for almost 100 years.’’

The concept is simple, he says. ‘‘We stimulate the immune system, do something magic, and the tumour disappears.’’

For most of those 100 years that ‘‘something magic’’ has proved elusive.

Now, the man whose company gave us the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine believes it is, at last, time to use the same technology to fill in that magical gap.

BioNTech is recruiting for a cancer trial – continuing the work it started before coronavirus. Two hundred people with colorectal cancer will be enrolled after surgery, each identified as being in the group most at risk of seeing their cancer return.

The hope is that an mRNA vaccine similar to that developed for coronavirus, but tailored to each individual patient’s cancer, will prevent their tumours from gaining a foothold.

If so, Sahin believes they could solve a longstanding problem. Cancer treatment ‘‘is often only the starting point of a long disease’’.

BioNTech published a paper in the journal Science in January 2020, showing positive preliminary results for a cancer vaccine.

Then he read about an unexplained cluster of pneumonia cases in China, and the entire company pivoted to coronavirus.

The only reason they could do that so quickly, Sahin says, was because of all the preparatory work in cancer. Conversely the reason he is now so much more confident that cancer is crackable is because of their success in coronavirus.

‘‘My vision is that after surgery everyone at risk of a relapse receives a cancer vaccine and the risk is diminished to a minimum,’’ Sahin says. ‘‘And what we would like to establish is that this works for many different tumour types – that this could be a universal treatment.’’