Therefore, the British government signed two partnerships: one with Biontech provided 10,000 patients with access to cancer treatments by 2030 and 10-year investment with Moderna in an innovative center and technology capable of producing up to 250 million vaccines. The stars are aligned.
In the pandemic, the UK has opened clinical trials for a few weeks. But before it took many years to complete a clinical trial. What has changed?
It is really attractive, because for many years, we believe that the study was inherently slow. It took 20 years to get a medicine to the market. Unfortunately, most cancer patients will give in when a drug is brought to the market. We have shown the world that it can be done in a year if you modernize your process, run parts of the parallel process and use digital tools.
Of course, opening a clinical trial in a pandemic is not necessarily a clinical trial for cancer. But you have had a breakthrough moment for the early stage of cancer vaccine.
There is a test run by Biontech, called BNT122, on people with high -risk intestinal cancer, not recruiting well worldwide. Therefore, when we announced the cancer -vaccine launcher, the UK cancer community took that opportunity. We opened that test at the University of Birmingham University, which was the most surprising thing for me, because it was not a leading cancer -cancer -research center.
We need 10,000 registered patients in the trial and we have come there within three months. It is quite great. It only shows that because we are a single health care system, we can do this much faster than any other country.
Domino began to fall very quickly on the back of that success: we opened a first and neck cancer test in Liverpool, a trial of esophageal and stomach cancer in Dundee, and a London lung cancer test. We started creating a community of people who are promoting the launch of cancer -cancer -ascetic vaccine tests as quickly as possible.
Some of MRNA-based cancer vaccines are in international clinical and UK clinical trials that are currently conducting 15 cancer-cancer tests. When will we see the first approved mRNA vaccine?
We have a test to prevent skin cancer again after you cut it. Now it has been completed. We have received too much again, like all tests we have done, and the test has completed a year before the deadline. It is completely unprecedented in cancer tests because they often run for too long.
What will happen now is that, in the next six to 12 months, we will follow the people in the trial and exercise if there is a difference between the use of cancer vaccines and those who do not. We hope to have results by the end of this year or early 2026. If it succeeds, we will invent the first personalized vaccine to be approved, within five years after the MRNA vaccine was first licensed for Codid. That is quite impressive.
Listen to Lennard Lee said at Wired health On March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets at Health.Wired.com.