The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is fast-tracking patients for its upcoming cancer vaccine trials. The vaccine uses the same mRNA technology as the Pfizer COVID vaccine. The program called the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, will customize each jab to the DNA of the people getting it.
Patients who meet eligibility criteria need only sign off on having their blood and tissues sampled to gain immediate access to the vaccine trial. Dozens of people have already been enrolled in the program, and thousands more will be able to get into the trials at 30 sites around the UK.
The agency is initially looking for patients with bladder, colorectal, kidney, lung, skin, and pancreatic cancers, but more types will be added as the program progresses. The NHS program is working in tandem with German vaccine maker BioNTech, whose mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have paved the way for the technology to be applied to all manner of illnesses and diseases.
The program’s first patient, a 55-year-old man suffering from colorectal cancer, had his cancerous tumor and part of his large intestine removed and went through chemotherapy prior to enrolling in the NHS pilot. He received the world’s first jab of the same type of mRNA vaccine that was used in Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine. The trial’s principal investigator is extremely hopeful about the outcome but states that more data is needed and they continue to recruit suitable patients to the trial to establish this further.
Read more: futurism.com