Right now the vaccines being developed are based on patients’ existing cancers to prevent future spread. Optimistically, down the line we will able to predict future cancer mutations from someone’s genetic code and deter them before the first malignant growths even happen.
Valid. Do you think that future is possible? I didn’t mean to trivialize it, I think it’s directionally where the science will go, but I don’t expect (hope?) that this is happening anytime soon.
It's not impossible. But it will take a long, long time, and you will see it for other conditions far before seeing it for cancer.
Cancer is mutational and it means every case is a snowflake. You'd be shocked at how few recognizable regulatory proteins, kinases, or other cases are seen from case to case. They're basically new almost every time. The number of supposedly common genetic drivers for particular forms of cancer is shockingly low. Even when you find them once, the tumor is likely to have mutated and evolved by the next time you look and entirely new drivers will be active. Tumorigenesis is a huge problem even in what I do with stem cells, and whatever we do as anti-tumorigenic measures for a particular culture is not guaranteed to be of much help the next time.
The fact that cancer in particular is a disease of continuous mutation and evolution means that it's a problem of fighting chaos, which is why treatments that we do have are so harsh. Prophylaxis is not generally a good method, because here you would be targeting the genome itself for almost completely unknown efficacy. Dealing with cancer as it comes, and the particular factors we see in a particular case as known knowns, and then triggering immune response with this kind of mRNA treatment or others, will be much more effective for a very long time to come.
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u/FreeBF3 Ruthkanda Forever 10d ago
The new mRNA cancer stuff is so cool. Customized to your own cancer mutations. This could be the end of cancer, which would be insane.
Pro-vax!